Workplace Mental Health B2B Services

The current optimal solution for workplace mental health B2B services is not to purchase a general EAP package as an employee benefit stack, but to take the customized route of "scenario binding + light penetration + layered intervention". Only in this way can professionalism and utilization be truly considered, and a win-win situation be achieved for employees, enterprises, and service providers.

Last year, I took over an Internet factory with 1,200 employees in Hangzhou. HR initially spent 280,000 to buy the standard package of the leading EAP service provider: unlimited psychological consultation hotline throughout the year + 24 general emotion management online classes + quarterly psychological assessment. As a result, the employee utilization rate was only 2.7% after half a year. The boss slapped the table at the review meeting and said that the money was wasted. Later, they switched to a small local service provider and integrated all services into specific work scenarios: the OA check-in pop-up window 3 days after the launch of the big promotion project will automatically push 10 minutes of shoulder and neck relaxation + breathing adjustment audio, free 1-to-1 stress relief appointments will be available one week after the performance appraisal, and new employees will be hired for 30 days With the "Workplace Complaint Tea Party", the management team assigned senior professional coaches alone. Even the programmers in the IT department who never participated in team building took the initiative to sign up for the supporting stress-relieving activities such as rock climbing and hiking. At the end of the year, the statistical utilization rate reached 42%, and the turnover rate of core positions dropped by 7.8 percentage points during the same period.

In fact, there are quite obvious differences in the industry on how to provide such services. Most of the traditional EAP service providers are "professional" and insist that all services must be provided by personnel holding the national second-level psychological counselor certificate. The process must be standardized and the files must be complete. They feel that many lightweight services now are "dwarfing the professionalism of psychological counseling" and are essentially cutting leeks from the enterprise; and those that have emerged in recent years Most of the new workplace service providers are "reachers" who believe that the prerequisite for talking about professionalism is that there are people who can use it. Employees don't even have the will to open the link. No matter how complete the professional system is, it is just a castle in the air. It is better to lower the threshold to the lowest level first. Even if it is just chatting with others or taking everyone to play games at the beginning, it will be useful if they can relieve their emotions. There are defensible arguments on both sides: I have seen some companies purchase too casual complaints services, which in turn amplified the negative emotions of employees, and eventually led to collective arbitration; I have also seen traditional EAP hotlines left unattended for half a year, and eventually became HR's excuse to deal with audits.

To be honest, the core reason why many companies are pitted is that they regard mental health services as universal benefits like rice, flour, oil and shopping cards, and never consider the vastly different needs of different groups. Last month I was chatting with the HRD of a manufacturing industry in Dongguan. There are 12,000 front-line workers in their factory. If you set up a psychological consultation room with a sign, the first reaction of the workers would be "You have a psychological problem." Later, they changed the service to a "chatting corner" of the labor union, with two The elder sister who has received basic psychological training usually just sits there and chats with everyone. The online class does not talk about emotional management. She specializes in parent-child education, getting along with mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, and chronic disease treatment. In half a year, the turnover rate of workers has dropped by almost 10 points. Do you think this is considered a mental health service? Of course, it’s even more useful than the classes taught by those high-level returnee consultants.

Another unavoidable issue is privacy, which is also the core reason why many employees dare not use such services: If I tell the consultant that I am under great pressure recently and want to leave my job, will it be passed on to my boss? The current consensus in the industry is that a three-party confidentiality agreement must be signed. Enterprises can only obtain aggregated anonymous data, such as which departments are the top three most stressed in the company, and whether everyone's common concerns are work rhythm or interpersonal relationships. No personal usage records must be disclosed. But to be honest, there are still many small service providers who cannot do this. I once heard that an employee of a certain factory made an appointment for psychological counseling. The next week, the department manager talked to him and asked if he was not in a good state recently, and finally forced the employee to leave. Whenever this happens once, no one will trust the mental health services of the entire company.

This industry is still in its early days, and there is no standard solution that is universally applicable. Someone asked me before whether to choose an expensive head EAP or a cheap local small service provider. I told them not to look at the quotation first, but to try it on three employees in different positions in my company: a newly graduated operation, a 35-year-old mid-level salesperson, and a front-line salesperson. Let them choose which one they are willing to use. The one with more people choosing it is the best. After all, workplace mental health services are never used to create KPIs for HR, nor are they a face-saving project to label companies as "humanized". They are essentially meant to capture the unspoken emotions of employees - only when people are in line can business be in order. This principle is universal no matter what industry you are in.