Survey on the Current Situation of Mental Health in the Workplace

Based on the 21,327 valid samples jointly surveyed by the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and CIIC Consulting in 2024, and the results of front-line interviews our team visited in 17 companies in different industries, the current mental health compliance rate of domestic workplace workers is only 34.6%, and more than 60% of the respondents have varying degrees of symptoms of anxiety and emotional exhaustion. The front lines of the Internet, finance, education and training, and manufacturing are areas with a high incidence of psychological problems, and only 12.3% of companies are equipped with systematic and implementable employee psychological support services. Can you believe it? This means that 6 out of every 10 people who go to work are in a state where "the energy in their hearts is about to be burned out."

Last month, I followed the research team to three cities: Hangzhou, Shanghai, and Suzhou. I pushed open the pantry doors of many companies, and the scene I encountered was more intuitive than the data: a girl from the operations position of an Internet company in Hangzhou cried while holding a plan that had just been revised to the third version. When she heard her colleagues calling her to answer a customer call, she wiped away her tears and switched to a smiling professional voice in two seconds.； In the rest area of ​​an auto parts factory in Suzhou, a young man born in 1998 squatted in the corner and watched funny videos for ten minutes. When the phone screen was turned off, there was no smile on his face. He turned around and went back to tighten the screws.

When I was working in a company, I heard complaints from HR veterans who have been in the industry for 20 years more than once: We worked overtime until early in the morning every day, and our boss scolded us until we cried without saying anything about our mental health. Nowadays, children who work overtime for two days are called depressed because they are not able to handle stress well. This kind of statement is not uncommon, and similar views can even be found on many workplace forums. It is believed that psychological problems are "free time" and "hypocritical."

But the survey data does not lie: according to our statistics, the emotional exhaustion score of the 22-30 year old group is 2.7 times that of the group over 40 years old, and the number one stress source is not overtime as everyone thinks, but the "unequal power and responsibility" - to put it bluntly, you do the work, you take the blame, and the leader takes the credit. When a management trainee from a financial company in Shanghai was talking to me, he said that when he won an award for a project he was working on, the leader went on stage to receive the award without even mentioning his name. Later, there was a small flaw in the project, and the leader directly put all the blame on him at the department meeting. He took the subway home for three stops that day, and when he came to his senses, he squatted on the platform and cried for half an hour. "I just felt so boring. I didn't know what I was going through."

Nowadays, many companies are also clamoring to pay attention to the mental health of their employees. The most common one is to provide EAP (Employee Psychological Assistance Program), which claims to provide free psychological counseling services to employees, but few people actually dare to use it. The planner of a game company in Shenzhen told me that the company launched EAP services last year. He had just finished a big project at that time and was completely devastated. He originally wanted to make an appointment for a consultation and asked an HR friend if he would keep records. The other person hesitated and said, "Normally, no." He immediately gave up the idea, "If the records are entered into the file, future promotions and salary increases will be affected. I'm not stupid." There are many pretentious EAPs. According to our research, only 21% of companies’ EAP services are completely anonymous and independent of the HR system.

Of course, there are some that do it in a practical way. There is a foreign-funded company in Shanghai that specializes in FMCG. Not only does it completely outsource EAP to a third party, ensuring absolute anonymity, but it also gives employees one day of "emotional leave" every month. There is no need to issue sick leave notes or make up excuses. If you feel you don't want to go to work in the morning, you can just mention it in the system. The day's work will automatically be assigned to colleagues to fill the seats, and full attendance will not be deducted. We asked HR if anyone would ask for leave indiscriminately. She laughed and said that after one year of implementation, the average person only takes two or three days per year, and the turnover rate has dropped by 18% compared with before. "We are all adults. If you really respect him, he will not deliberately cause trouble for you."

There is actually a lot of quarrel between academia and business circles about how to solve psychological problems in the workplace. Traditional management scholars believe that enterprises are all about efficiency. Providing these emotional benefits is a waste of cost and can easily weaken the morale of the army. It is better to give more money to employees. ； But scholars who study new generation management don’t think so. They say that today’s young people are no longer looking for jobs only based on salary. If you don’t take care of their emotions, they will resign. The cost of recruiting and training new people is much higher than providing emotional benefits. What’s interesting is that the cases we came across confirmed the latter statement: There is a small SaaS startup company in Hangzhou that holds an hour of “complaint meeting” every Friday afternoon. Whether it’s to complain about the boss or about needs, you name it, no one holds a grudge, and the founder even takes the lead in complaining about himself. This small company with more than 30 people has a core employee turnover rate of 0 after its establishment for more than three years, and its revenue doubled last year.

Before leaving the factory in Suzhou last week, I bumped into the young man who had been squatting in the corner watching videos at the door of the workshop. He was holding the ice soda he had just bought. He said hello to the monitor and told him to come in two minutes later. He stood in the sun and drank half the bottle. He hissed when it was cold, and finally there was some vitality on his face. The squad leader leaned against the door and told us that they used to be very strict and did not allow people to run around or play with mobile phones during breaks. Later, they found that the more they controlled us, the less motivated they were to work and the defective rate was still high. Now they are letting us go. As long as the work is done well, everything else will be fine. "In the past two months, the defective rate has dropped by 0.2 percentage points, which is better than anything else."

In fact, there are not so many pretentious employees, but everyone has finally begun to admit that people in the workplace are human beings first, not just machines that can only do work.