Standards for mental health in the workplace

At present, the workplace mental health recognized by the clinical psychology community and the corporate EAP service field has never been "always positive, never complaining, and working full time all year round without taking advantage of others." It is a dynamic balance of "self-perceived comfort, professional value matching, and social relationship compatibility." There is no absolute quantitative scale. The core is "you do not screw yourself up, and at the same time do not cause irreversible trouble to the people around you."

Last month, when I was doing an EAP interview for an Internet company, I met a little girl who was born in 1998 and worked in user operations. Many people in the department privately muttered that she had a "weird personality and psychological problems" - she would just grab her bag and leave at the end of the day. All work messages during non-working hours would be answered the next day. When faced with a need to be patted on the head during a meeting, she dared to directly slap the director on the table and say, "The schedule is unreasonable and I can't finish it. Either add more people or extend the deadline." But you can say that she is in poor condition. She has received S performance for three consecutive quarters. She said that she goes home from get off work to go to the pottery studio and play with the cat. She rarely even suffers from insomnia. Our project team also had a quarrel about this at the time: consultants from the traditional organizational behavior school felt that she had "low organizational commitment and insufficient collaboration" and was a "high-risk employee" who needed intervention. However, colleagues doing positive psychology research directly refuted it, saying that this was "a typical manifestation of a high sense of psychological boundaries, and her mental health level is much higher than that of the group of old employees who stay up late and work overtime every day and dare not raise their needs." You see, even the judgment standards of professionals are not uniform, so how can there be any template that is universally applicable?

Many managers like to regard "emotional stability" as the first KPI for mental health in the workplace, and even require employees not to turn against each other even if they are wronged, and to smile and change plans even if they work overtime and break down. This is actually putting PUA in a mental health shell. One of the cases I received last year was a 32-year-old product manager who had won the company's "Best Collaborator" award for two consecutive years. He had never been embarrassed by anyone in the five years he had been in the company. The school of psychoanalysis has always had a view: it is normal to vent moderate negative emotions in the workplace. Arguing with colleagues about plans during meetings, and complaining about strange leaders during lunch breaks are all manifestations of the normal operation of psychological defense mechanisms. On the contrary, those "good old people" who have never expressed negative emotions are the ones who are most susceptible to psychological problems.

Let me talk about an interesting survey conclusion. Last year, we teamed up with the HR of three manufacturing companies to conduct a sample of 1,000 people, and found that the colleagues who are generally recognized as "the best in the workplace" are not among the top three in performance. They are the group of people who "do their work seriously at work, ignore work after get off work, and occasionally talk back to their leaders to fight for benefits." When I was working as HR in a car company, I met a process engineer who graduated from 985. After working for half a year, he was sighing every day. The department leader felt that he had high ambitions and low skills, and had mental problems, so he advised him to see a psychiatrist. As a result, he resigned and became an industrial science blogger. Now he earns more in one year than in the previous ten years. When I met him a while ago, he looked radiant and said that he no longer had to change parameters on drawings every day. Do you think his previous state in the factory was mentally unhealthy? In fact, the humanistic school has long said that the core premise of mental health in the workplace is "the possibility of self-realization." If a job completely fails to meet your value points, no matter how much money you make and how kind your colleagues are, and you feel like you are in jail sitting at your desk every day, then it is definitely not a healthy state. It has nothing to do with your own psychological quality. It just means that the person and the position are not suitable.

Don’t feel that you have to mingle with all your colleagues and gossip during lunch breaks to be socially healthy. I have a friend who works in algorithms who is born with social anxiety. He always blushes when greeting his colleagues. He always sits in the corner during meetings. He can push and push whenever possible in department team building. However, the code he writes never has bugs. When colleagues ask him questions, he will patiently write notes and send them to him. Although he has no personal relationship, the entire team thinks highly of him. He himself also said that it is very comfortable not to have to deal with ineffective social interactions. The views of the social psychology school have always been very clear: the core of workplace relationships is "sense of boundaries" rather than "sense of intimacy". Those companies that shout "We are one family" every day are prone to emotional infighting due to blurred boundaries. You don't have to force yourself to fit into an inappropriate circle. As long as your behavior does not cause trouble to others' work, working alone is the most efficient way to get along.

Oh, by the way, there is another small criterion that many people have not mentioned. I have been doing EAP consulting for 6 years and it has always worked well for me: if you get up in the morning and don’t instinctively feel sick or break into cold sweats when you think about going to work, and you can still have the energy to do something you like after get off work, whether it is watching TV series, playing games or taking a walk with your family, then your workplace mental health status has exceeded 80% of people. Really, don’t take the test questions that come from unknown sources on the Internet and don’t be fooled by the company’s propaganda. Some people like to get bonuses for performance and feel comfortable staying up late. Some people like to get off work at a certain time and do as much work as they get paid. No one is right or wrong. The core is that you feel comfortable and don’t hinder others. That’s enough.