Employee assistance

Li Xu, medical director of Beijing Psychen-Chestnut Global Partners Inc, believes fierce competition in today's business environment is turning the screw on mid-level employees.

Young professionals just starting out and eager to make their marks are also more likely to be on the receiving end.

Li's company provides employee assistance programs (EAP) aimed at helping employees deal with personal problems that may impact their work performance, health and well-being. The consultants give group lectures and also conduct one-to-one therapy sessions.

He says pressure at work has grown in tandem with competitiveness in the market. More employers are now aware of the problems and consequential threats and investing in EAP services.

It is obvious the problem has become serious enough for employers to take active steps. But it was not always so.

"In 1990s, an Australian company became the first in China to provide such services, but it soon closed because of the lack of demand," Li says.

It was a different scenario then. A decade ago, many businesses were still in a fledging stage and employees enjoyed both better welfare and clearly marked career paths.

But as businesses matured and market forces started to work, mergers and acquisitions have made employment less secure.

The iron rice bowl is no more.

Young professionals in China also have to face issues on marriage, family, rising property prices and long commutes to work - problems all thrown up by rapid urbanization and equally rapid social changes.

Thirty percent of the 100,000-client base that Li's company has across China complain about work-related stress and burnout. It is an unusually high rate, given that the same comparative segment in the US is only around 6 percent.

The calls come from low-and mid-level management, the people usually sandwiched between senior officers who give orders and their subordinates, whom they have to coax into productivity.

They have to deal with long working hours, low job satisfaction, little control over their role at work and even less support from senior management.

Yan observes that professionals such as teachers, nurses, lawyers and journalists experience the highest burnout rates.

"My clients include some of the best lawyers and journalists in Shanghai, who tell me they simply want to leave everything behind to travel the world," he says.

Even lawyers, normally trained to be rational and in self-control, are showing visible cracks. More are going into therapy.

Small-town scholars hitting the big time in major cities are also likely to suffer more stress. For one, they have to work harder to overcome the prejudices of locality. And in a strange city, they are often without a familiar support network.

Li Xu's company found that employees from other provinces are more likely to call the EAP hotline.

While local managers may complain about personal issues like love, marriage and family encroaching on their performances at work, the out-of-towners mostly speak of coping with pressures at the work place.

Yang Zhiying, a professor of psychology and a therapist from Capital Normal University, believes that a society changing at breakneck speed will put pressure on white-collar workers, although the burnout rate and pressure levels will depend on the resilience of individual character. It also depends on how fast people adapt to changes.

She believes that the pressure has grown dramatically with the evolution of the workplace culture. Thirty years ago, she recalls, it was "everybody eating from the same big pot" - a euphemism for equal treatment of all in the same enterprise regardless of performance. In those days, few were under pressure to stand out.

It is a different era these days when the way up means investing extra effort and putting yourself forward. Sometimes, it's a matter of the Peter Principle.

"People burn out when they are given tasks beyond their capabilities," Yang notes.