workplace mental health border design

The innermost layer is the early warning line for individual emotional awareness, the middle layer is the boundary consensus of the collaboration scene, and the outermost layer is the bottom line of the enterprise system. The linkage ability of the three does not affect the progress of work, but also keeps professional burnout and emotional internal friction out of the safe zone.

To be honest, I had dinner with an operator friend of an Internet company last week. She drank three glasses of iced Americano before she could speak. She said that she had received seven or eight cross-department temporary requests in three consecutive weeks last month. Once after changing the plan at 1 a.m., she couldn't hold it back. She squatted in the company's fire escape and cried for 20 minutes. She didn't dare to let her colleagues see her, and she didn't dare to say no to her boss. This is a typical "missing border": she neither drew an emotional warning line for herself nor reached a boundary consensus with her collaborators, and she relied on hard work to consume herself.

Many people have misunderstandings about this "border" and think it means "getting off work on time and not replying to messages from the boss during non-working hours." Don't believe it, I have seen a recent graduate do this before. In the third week of the probation period, he was directly dismissed because he lost contact with the project for two hours before it went online. The frame is never used to fight against the company. It is more like a low-battery reminder on your phone or the eye protection mode on your computer. It helps you filter out unnecessary consumption, rather than letting you shut down the phone and stop working.

I talked about this topic with an EAP (employee assistance program) consultant of a major factory before. Her point of view is entirely from an individual perspective, and she belongs to the "individual adjustment school" in the industry: She feels that the first step in frame design is always to find out your own tolerance threshold. For example, if you are going to leave the house within a week, If you have the urge to smash the keyboard three times, or if you lie in bed for three consecutive days and review the work conflicts during the day for half an hour, you must take the initiative to give an early warning. Even if you cancel a non-core meeting, or sneak in for half an hour to drink a cup of milk tea in the afternoon, it is better than forcing yourself to collapse in the end. She had a case in hand, involving a boy who worked on algorithms. He had slept less than 5 hours a day for two months in a row. He had severe heart palpitations and refused to take leave. In the end, she directly contacted HR to force him to take three days off, so nothing serious happened. The advantage of this view is that it is flexible and fully adaptable to personal circumstances, but the disadvantage is also obvious: if the company you work for has a PUA culture and shouts "overtime is a blessing" every day, no matter how you adjust yourself, you will not be able to stop your superiors from stuffing you with more work than you can handle every day.

The HRs of many real companies that I have come into contact with are more biased towards the implementation of the system and belong to the "system-oriented group". For example, I talked to the HRD of a manufacturing industry in the Pearl River Delta. Their company's border is written directly into the employee handbook: in non-emergency situations (such as production line accidents, major customer complaints), work messages are not allowed to be sent on rest days. Employees have the right not to reply if they send messages. There is also half a day of unreasonable "emotional leave" every month. There is no need to explain the reason to the leader, just report it in the system in advance. They conducted an employee satisfaction survey last year and found that the proportion of workplace anxiety dropped by 27%, and the turnover rate also dropped by almost 10 points. However, this model also has limitations. If you are a startup company or an Internet project team with extremely volatile business, such as the supply chain team that was responsible for ensuring people's livelihood during the epidemic last year, you have to connect with logistics dispatch in the middle of the night. A completely one-size-fits-all system will affect business advancement, and in the end it is the employees themselves who will suffer.

The third way of thinking has gradually emerged in the industry in the past two years. I personally practiced it when I was doing organizational optimization in a SaaS company with about 100 people last year. It belongs to the "two-way co-construction school": it is not the company unilaterally setting the rules, nor the employees secretly setting boundaries, but at the beginning of each quarter, all the team members sit together and create a "collaboration" "Boundary List", for example, the design post clearly does not accept revision requests within 24 hours, the operation post only responds to emergency online incidents on weekends, and the sales post does not occupy mid-week evening training meetings unless there are special circumstances. Everyone discusses and signs all rules together. When collaborating across departments, make a list first, and requirements that do not meet the rules are directly sent back to the special approval process. At that time, the girl in the design department of their company had to make temporary revisions three or four times a week, and her hair was falling out so much that it could no longer cover her hair. After the rules were implemented, she took a week off last month to go to Yunnan, and her quarterly output was 30% higher than before. Of course, this model is not perfect. If there is a veteran in the team who deliberately takes advantage of the rules to take the blame, it will cause serious problems for those who work hard. A corresponding supervision mechanism must be implemented.

I also encountered the pitfalls of the border when I first started working. At that time, I always felt that "young people should show more performance". I would reply immediately to messages sent by my boss at two o'clock in the morning. Later, I had insomnia for two months and went to the doctor. I had reached a state of mild anxiety. The advice given by the doctor was very simple: put the work computer in the living room after ten o'clock at night. Unless the project scheduled in advance is online, I will reply the next day. I was worried that my boss would have objections. Unexpectedly, after trying it for half a month, my boss said that my concentration during the day was much better and I rarely made low-level mistakes.

To put it bluntly, there has never been a unified template for the boundaries of mental health in the workplace. Whether you are a screwdriver in a large factory or a generalist in a small company, a newcomer to the industry or a manager leading a team, the suitable boundaries will be different. It is like the mask you wear. You can choose N95 or ordinary medical mask according to the occasion, or you can take it off to breathe in a place where no one is around. The core is never to restrict you, but to help you block unnecessary harm. The best frame is the one that allows you to work for a long time without getting upset.