Workplace Mental Health Assessment

Workplace mental health assessment is not a management tool to "find employee faults", nor is it a universal "emotional antidote" - it is essentially a set of quantitative reference scales that have been tested for reliability and validity. It is an auxiliary to self-awareness for individuals and a means of risk warning for enterprises. The boundaries of its effects are clear, and there is no need to deify or kill them all.

Last week, I helped a friend’s Internet company conduct an assessment and listened to their HR complain about the big pitfalls they encountered last year: I randomly found the SDS Depression Self-Assessment Scale that was circulated on the Internet and gave it to all employees to fill in. Half of them showed moderate depression. I was so scared that the entire administrative department contacted EAP consultants overnight to prepare for one-on-one meetings. After we finally talked, we found out that the day when the questionnaire was sent out happened to be the end of the quarterly review meeting. Most of the people had just finished being scolded by the boss. When filling out the options, they chose randomly with emotion and did not count at all. It sounds ridiculous to say, but this is actually the current situation of most companies doing mental health assessments: they dare to use a scale without even understanding the basic applicable scenarios.

In fact, the current attitude of academic circles towards workplace mental health assessment has been divided. Researchers in the school of clinical psychology have always been opposed to the abuse of this type of assessment. Their core point of view is very clear: the testing environment of workplace assessment and the state of the respondents are not controlled, and the results can only be used as a reference and cannot be equated with clinical diagnosis, let alone the basis for personnel decisions. In the past two years, it was widely reported that a major factory included employees with "high anxiety tendencies" on the layoff list. This is a typical overstep. It not only violates professional ethics, but is also a misuse of psychological tools. However, researchers from the organizational behavior school have a different view: the common sources of stress in the workplace are too clear now, such as the anxiety of KPI inversion, the panic of the 35-year-old threshold, the internal friction of cross-department scapegoating, and relying on HR to talk to individuals one by one is too inefficient. Standardized assessments can quickly screen out high-risk groups and intervene in advance, which is better than waiting for employees to exhibit extreme behaviors and then remediating them. The two views have been arguing for almost ten years, and there is still no unified conclusion. The only consensus is that the evaluation itself is neutral, and whether it is useful or not depends entirely on whether the person using it respects the boundaries.

In the past two years, I have helped people interpret no less than a hundred workplace mental health assessment reports. The most interesting one was a little girl who was working in user operations. For the first time, she was tested for a burnout score of 92, and her interpersonal sensitivity was seriously exceeded. She cried on the spot when she got the report, thinking she had a mental illness and had to leave her job. I looked through the details of her answers and found that she had the highest score for all the questions related to "communication with superiors" and "cross-department collaboration." After questioning, I found out that their department had just changed to a PUA leader, who would scold her for half an hour in public every day for her small mistakes. Her state was simply a stress reaction in a specific scenario and had nothing to do with mental illness. Later, she was transferred to another department and took the test again last month. Her burnout score dropped directly to 38, which is lower than the industry average. To put it bluntly, most of the time what the assessment says is not "there is something wrong with you" but "there is something wrong with the environment you are in". Don't label yourself casually.

Don’t believe the pheasant test that “tests you with 10 questions to determine whether you are burnt out in the workplace” circulated in the circle of friends. A serious workplace mental health assessment must first have a matching norm, that is, the average score of people in the same industry, age group, and job level must be used as a reference. As an investment banker, it is normal for your stress score to be two or three times higher than the norm for primary school teachers, and it is not an abnormality at all. If you encounter an assessment that directly asks "Have you had any suicidal thoughts recently?", just turn it off. In order to avoid the respondent's resistance and conceal the true status, formal assessments will break down the relevant questions into more subtle descriptions, such as "Have you recently lost interest in activities that you liked before?"

Don’t always think that assessment is a tool used by companies to monitor employees. I have seen many people take the initiative to seek professional assessment for self-examination. Last year, a boy who was doing back-end development came to me and said that he always felt unmotivated at work and was dawdling around every day. He thought he was too lazy. After the test, I found that his social trait score was far higher than the average for technical positions. In essence, his career matching was too low and he was not suitable for working on code every day. Later, he switched to being a product manager for developers, talking about requirements with people from different teams every day. His overall condition improved visibly, and he was promoted to supervisor within half a year.

To put it bluntly, workplace mental health assessment is like a small flashlight you carry with you. Shining it when walking at night can help you see the emotional blind spots that you usually don’t notice. But whether what is shown is dust or shadows, you have to get closer and take a closer look to find out. Don’t think of the shadows as monsters and scare them away, and don’t think that with a flashlight, you don’t have to lift your feet to explore the way.