Drain the workplace stress swamp

Targeting stress reduces disability, poor work performance and turnover

When organizations are concerned about stress, what they’re really worried about are three things. As a human resource vice-president put it: “First, the stress leaves just keep on coming. Second, the work is not getting done — at least, not the way it should. And two of our best people just got fed up and flat out resigned.”

In short, targetting stress is about targeting: disabilities, daily or discretionary work performance, and turnover.

At the Canadian Institute of Stress, this familiar trio is called “D.D.T.” It relates to the toxicity that has gradually seeped through many workplaces in the past decade — a byproduct of too much stress plus too little satisfaction that persist for too long.

Can courses on stress management or work-life balance drain the swamp? Not a chance. One front-line airline manager put it this way: “Maybe learning to control your heart rate, or visualizing your way through the next disaster appeals to some. To me it’s a joke. Sure, a lot (of employees) attend the workshops. They clearly want something. But, it’s not showing up on the job.”

Sensing that these solutions don’t work, many employers are giving up on “the stress problem.” Findings in a recent Canada-wide survey by Buffett Taylor show that while 64 per cent of employers see stress as their top workforce threat, only half of those (32 per cent) are giving priority to solving it.

In the past decade, stress claims have doubled, rising from 25 per cent to more than 54 per cent of total disabilities. But stress, by itself, is not the problem. Research by the Canadian Institute of Stress shows that elevated chronic stress levels increase the risk of stress-based disability by 35 per cent as compared to a normally stressed workforce. That’s bad enough, but when higher stress is accompanied either by decreased “work satisfaction” or by decreased “engagement” amongst employees, the risks of stress disability rise by factors of 110 per cent and 160 per cent, respectively.

Addressing D.D.T. requires a two-pronged approach. First, help the walking wounded, those people already suffering from the effects of workplace toxicity. Second, plug the intake of the D.D.T. pipeline, and the way to do this is to involve employees in identifying, and solving, the causes of stress.

Help the walking wounded help themselves

Between 15 and 20 per cent of employees today qualify as “the walking wounded.” While present on the job, their health, performance and engagement have been eroded by the toxic cocktail. Of these, 30 per cent eventually come forward for help. Unfortunately, due to stigma and related reasons, the remaining 70 per cent suffer and under-perform in silence. They will typically endure D.D.T. for two to five years before they suddenly take early retirement, go on long-term disability, just resign, launch an employment standards case, or get fired.

Since most managers understandably prefer to avoid dealing with employees’ personal or coping issues, it’s up to organizations to “market” self-management training, coaching or the EAP more successfully.

By introducing lunch-and-learns and using the power of the Internet to confidentially send personalized “pull marketing” messages to each employee, organizations can dramatically increase the likelihood of the walking wounded seeking help. The key is to help each of the walking wounded to recognize and then connect their specific “pain” to action steps which are personalized, simple and confidential.

Roll back workplace toxicity

Having taken action to reduce the walking wounded numbers, organizations have to take steps to prevent other employees from entering the D.D.T. pipeline.

Whether employees think of their workplace as “a good place to work” or “a sweatshop” depends more on a work team’s culture and less on “the facts.”

So, while reducing D.D.T. risks in a team is, about maintaining good working conditions, it is even more based on fostering a team mindset and culture in which the core belief is, “This place isn’t perfect but, by and large, it responds well to our needs and feelings about stress and satisfaction in our work.”

Extensive research at the Institute shows employee-driven solutions, built into routine team operations, can be highly effective in creating and then preserving the “good place to work” mindset.

Here’s one of several thousand scenarios where employees identify the cause of stress and then solve it. At the headquarters of a large trust company, customer service reps were asked to log and profile every call in terms of seven call factors. These busy workers were already handling many calls at once. They felt the additional work not only increased stress levels but also drained their satisfaction in giving top notch service. To cope, they started inventing the seven-factor data at the end of the day.

The employees’ proposal: simply to profile only 20 per cent of the calls. The solution gave the trust company truly representative data and fell within the employees’ view of reasonable daily stress.

While previously jaded employees are often initially skeptical, the benefits in their stress and satisfaction levels quickly win them over. Unlike other business process improvement methods, employee-driven problem-solving not only produces significant cost savings, it also explicitly places equal value on employees’ feelings about their work, and their insights on how it should be managed. As an airline reservations agent put it, “Finally, they’re respecting that I know my job and my customers better than they do.”

Richard Earle is managing director of the Canadian Institute of Stress. He may be reached at (416) 236-4218 or at [email protected].

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