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Few staff will see a company psychologist for help with anxiety, stress or burnout. New app bien-être offers an alternative
- Workplace stress was already on the rise, and the pandemic made it worse. Yet only 5 per cent of big companies’ staff use in-house mental health assistance
- Two women have created an app for employers that will instead let staff consult outside therapists in privacy. It will launch in Hong Kong, Singapore and France
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Terry Wou has worked in the finance industry for 20 years, and has seen first-hand the toll that long working hours, work-family conflict and high demands can take on people’s mental health.
“We feel that more than half the people in our industry are not well,” says Wou, whose husband also works in finance. “A lot are burned out or stressed out, or doing crazy things like drugs and gambling … none of them looked for help or wanted to talk about it.”
In 2019, the World Health Organisation labelled employee burnout a medical condition, noting that its cause is chronic workplace stress – and that was before the pandemic. The situation has only intensified over the past year.
“We feel that more than half the people in our industry are not well,” says Wou, whose husband also works in finance. “A lot are burned out or stressed out, or doing crazy things like drugs and gambling … none of them looked for help or wanted to talk about it.”
In 2019, the World Health Organisation labelled employee burnout a medical condition, noting that its cause is chronic workplace stress – and that was before the pandemic. The situation has only intensified over the past year.
“Working from home during the pandemic has blurred boundaries, there is no work-life balance. A lot of my friends are working around the clock and with Zoom there are no boundaries, it gets crazier,” says Wou, speaking from her home in France.
Wou and her family moved from Hong Kong to her husband’s native France in July last year. She recently completed a Masters in Psychology at the University of Hong Kong while running her own fundraising company and was searching for a new business idea.
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Towards the end of the year, she returned to Hong Kong for her nephew’s wedding, and it was during her 14-day quarantine that inspiration struck.
“Locked up in a hotel room, the idea came to me and I finished my business plan before I left my hotel room,” says Wou.
That idea was bien-être (French for well-being), a digital mental health service for corporations which will go live at the end of June. The app aims to provide mental health support to employees of large corporations.
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