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An employee’s view of Stress Management
July 5th, 2008
Everybody knows stress is dangerous. We hear a lot about Stress Management, and not much about practical results from all this science.
Stress has actual physical side effects. Most people don’t know how dangerous some of these effects are. These include blood sugar increase (which must be great for diabetics) speeding up the heart rate (terrific for the very large number of middleaged people with heart issues, muscle tension, and a circulation effect which pushes blood to the extremities.
Obviously nobody was kidding when they said, Stress kills.
People can take some stress. Everybody has a level they can cope with. In the workplace, however, it can be a deluge.
A few things have been identified as causes: Lack of training, (who’d have guessed?) the time factor, like trying to handle deadlines, (Yeah, 48 hours in a day just isn’t enough) and (inevitably) performance situations. (Who invented performance reviews, and what good have they ever done? Maybe it was the same geniuses who invented KPIs.)
The figures don’t look good. One survey showed that over 50% of Generation Y take stress leave. More than a quarter of Baby Boomers also take stress leave. Since they’re a generation apart, we can assume Generation X aren’t doing too well, either. Just one big, miserable, nuthouse.
Those figures mean $300 billion spent on stress in the US alone. Add to this the fact that absenteeism means putting more stress on the people who show up.
Other forms of ill health aren’t exactly cheap, either, with diabetes and heart disease costing, quite literally, a fortune. Not even including depression, etc.
Employers have come up with a sort of flow chart which involves creating stress management programs, and sending them up into the clouds for approval by senior management. Nice, neat, and completely, utterly, totally, unconvincing.
Sounds terrific. No mention of the fact that if all these figures are available, senior management hasn’t exactly been breaking the doors down to do much about them. It’s hard for employees to believe that the people who are seen as causing the problem are very interested in solving it. After all, some of these companies are making billions out of highly stressed people.
Stress Management has become an industry in its own right. There are schemes, budgets, and a lot of procedures. Who could possibly live without procedures? Could life on Earth continue?
There’s a lot of hard sell of Stress Management services, too. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, but someone’s found a market, for sure. Not wishing to sound too cynical, but if everyone’s so keen on reducing stress, what about cutting out the things that cause stress?
Things like:
Ridiculous workloads
Ridiculous timeframes
Crazy restructurings
Endless new procedures
Not paying attention to employees who are trying to tell management about real problems
Cheapskate employment practices
Hiring idiots/psychopaths to do surveillance of employees
Decent work environments less than 20 years old
Nutcase supervisors and managers
Doing everything the old fashioned way
Recognition for staff who do a good job
Salaries which have some vague relationship to 20th century pay scales
Getting management out of those everlasting, stupid meetings
Fewer actual criminals in the workplace
Workplace tyrants and bullies
Sycophants getting paid millions for brown nosing, while the people doing the actual profitable work get paid next to nothing, by any comparison
Sleazy hiring and firing practices
Office politics taking precedence over everything else
Favoritism at the expense of reality
Get rid of those, and there’d be a lot less stress. Like, maybe, 100%. People might actually like their jobs, and want to come to work.
Not despise them, and do everything they can to get better jobs.
The other part of this equation is a huge turnover in staff. People don’t stay in stressful environments if they can help it. If they can escape, they will. That adds training costs for new staff, and the wonderful ritual of being both short staffed and having to hire people do fill the same jobs, time and time again.
Does management actually think people want to pay psychotherapists and pharmaceutical costs?
That they want a CV full of stress related jobs that didn’t work out, and a trashed career?
That the kind of home life that a severely stressed out family has is some sort of holiday?
Stress causes:
Serious mental health cases, literally by the millions
Suicides
Homicides, including multiple homicides
Divorces
Assaults
Lawsuits
Legal liabilities
Huge impacts on the health system
Gigantic costs to the bottom line
Social problems, related to all of the above
There’s another few trillion bucks in avoidable problems.
Excuse me if I’m not holding my breath to see some sort of Renaissance in the workplace in the next five minutes. This has been going on for decades. It was first noticed in the 1980s. Nearly 30 years later, not a lot has happened.
The workaholic ideal is based on a lot of people saying how happy they are to be working themselves into the grave. That’s not work, it’s a form of death. Some people are so dazed by workloads they don’t really have much idea what they’re doing. If they ever did, which is also debatable, to say the least.
That’s part of the so-called Ethos that is so absurd you’d think even the morons who dreamed it up would have realized by now.
Let’s get this straight, for once:
Management isn’t some sort of helpless child. It can fix this, anytime. None of these stress situations ever needs, or needed, to happen.
What, exactly, is wrong with a workplace where people get rational levels of work, which they can get done without some sort of major emotional crisis intruding every five seconds?
Here’s a thought for those who are wondering: Sooner or later, someone is going to be able to do a successful class action on work related stress against an employer. When that happens, Merry Christmas to all the people who’ve suffered so much, for so long, for so little reason.
2 Responses to “An employee’s view of Stress Management”
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July 7th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
I enjoyed reading this post. I’ve had debates about this with my father and his business partners, especially regarding the different ‘work ethics’ between the generations. Time will tell, but many folks in my generation (25-32 yrs old) work hard but don’t put everything on the line for their job. I view this as balance, which is a good thing, but it does lead to a perception of laziness.
On a slight aside, I was once hired for a company the day before they fired over 10% of its workforce… what a way to be hired! There is no way I was going to run myself into the ground for a business like that (my own company is a different matter
). The missing motivation is not an ingrained laziness but caused by bad management.
July 8th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Stress is on the increase. Some companies have effective ways to deal with this. Others struggle.
I can’t see why stress doesn’t receive more focus in areas such as health and safety legislation. It is, as noted, very dangerous.