12
Oct
Reducing work-related stress
in General
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Work-related stress /(noun): The adverse reaction people have to excessive pressures or other types of demand placed on them at work – UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE)
A major challenge
According to the 2022 annual Health and Wellbeing at Work Survey 2022 from the UK Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), stress continues to be one of the main causes of short- and long-term absence. In very similar findings to last year, nearly four-fifths (79%) of respondents report some stress-related absence in their organisation over the last year, and this figure rises to 90% of large organisations (with more than 250 employees). The UK survey took place in November and December 2021 and gathered insights from 804 HR professionals spanning the private (57%), public (27%) and voluntary (16%) sectors.
The same report revealed signs that the focus of organisations on health and well being has slipped a little – “70% of HR respondents agree that employee wellbeing is on senior leaders’ agendas, down from 75% last year, while 42% think that senior leaders encourage a focus on mental wellbeing through their actions and behaviour compared with 48% last year”. This probably reflects changes in priorities with Covid no longer being such an important issue as it was in 2020 and early 2021.
In 2017/18 the UK Health and Safety Executive concluded that work-related stress is the leading cause of ill health and sickness absence in Britain with over 0.6m cases of work-related stress, depression or anxiety. This accounted for 44% of all the cases of work-related ill health in Britain. In 2020/21 their survey concluded work-related stress, depression or anxiety accounted for 50% of all work-related ill health, higher than the 2018/19 pre-coronavirus levels.
Whilst the above statistics are in respect of the UK, other countries have similar experience. According to the Gallup 2019 Global Emotions Report Americans are amongst the most stressed people in the world. 55% of respondents told Gallup they had felt a lot of stress the day before, well above the global average of 35%.
According to the American Institute of Stress, occupational pressures and fears are the leading source of stress for American adults, and these have increased over the past few decades. The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EASHW) states that around half of European workers consider stress to be common in their workplace, contributing to around half of all lost working days.
According to the EASHW, “psychosocial risks in the workplace arise from poor work design, organisation and management, as well as a poor social context of work, and they may result in negative psychological, physical and social outcomes such as work-related stress, burnout or depression. Some examples of working conditions (which are just as manageable as any other workplace safety and health risk) leading to psychosocial risks are:
• Excessive workloads
• Conflicting demands and lack of role clarity
• Lack of involvement in making decisions that affect the worker and lack of influence over the way the job is done
• Poorly managed organisational change, job insecurity
• Ineffective communication, lack of support from management or colleagues
• Psychological and sexual harassment, third party violence”
Smartphones and stress
One of the main contributors to stress inside and outside of the workplace is the smartphone, tending to be used more as a mobile computer rather than for its original purpose to make calls. According to Statista, 85% of Americans now own one, up from 35% in 2011. The same growth has been mirrored around the World. Again according to Statista, there are 6.64 billion smartphone users in the world today, in other words, over 83% of the world’s population owns a smartphone.
According to the American Institute of Stress, a study of over 1300 people who regularly used cell phones found that they “experienced an increase in psychological distress and a decrease in family satisfaction” due to the intrusion of frequent work related calls that disrupted life at home or while on vacation.
The same study also looked at “spillover” — the seepage of work concerns into home life, and vice versa, concluding that for both men and women, “cell phone and pager use allows negative job concerns to infiltrate another part of life”.
It probably doesn’t require a survey to tell us that, for many, stress and anxiety increase when we are separated from our smartphone. They tend to be a continuing distraction throughout the day and can cause sleep loss at night, disturbing your 24 hour clock, what is known as your circadian rhythm.
Whilst much of this pressure comes from non-work related activity, such as the use of social media, there is for many an overlap between life in and away from the workplace. Experts tell us that increasingly we are failing to switch off when outside of the workplace, checking emails during our spare time, and for some this can have serious implications.
The consequences of stress
Aside from the obvious impact 17.9m days of absence in the UK in 2019/20 (per UK HSE) from work-related stress has on productivity, the consequences for the health and well-being of employees are significant: as well as making life miserable some are potentially life threatening. These consequences include the following:
What should an employer do?
Confronting the early signs and symptoms of stress is good business practice. This will affect both the ability of an organisation to recruit the best people as well as reduce the costs that are incurred as a result of work-related stress. Staff attraction and retention strategies are critical to the success of any organisation, and what happens in the workplace play a major part in both.
Younger employees are at the forefront of change in the workforce. For an organisation to thrive it needs to recruit the best people and therefore must be aware of what this younger generation wants and needs. It must also acknowledge their willingness to change jobs in order to satisfy those wants and needs. Not surprisingly, what this particular generation wants is also coveted by most of the workforce, there being no correlation with age or position.
Salary will always be important but, significantly, young people want their work to have meaning and purpose, to have opportunities to develop and for their job to fit their life. What they truly care about are those things that offer them greater flexibility and independence, as well as the ability to lead a better life. Having a life, not just a job – getting the work/life balance right – is often their priority. Recent UK research by recruitment firm Robert Half revealed “that more than one in 10 UK employees are unhappy at work, with many finding their job stressful and reporting dissatisfaction with their work-life balance” and that “sickness and absences at work are one of the indicators to employee wellbeing”.
Because of this, it is therefore critical that, not only does an organisation make available a working environment that is as pleasant and as stress free as possible to work in, but that it also considers adopting those working practices that enhance flexibility and independence, remote working being an example.
By not identifying and then addressing stress in the work place the consequences are clear, the most obvious being employee absence and its direct link to productivity. However, in some instances the impact is less clear, and sometimes delayed. Whilst not being absent but stressed, it is easy to see how an employee can lose focus when in the workplace, again with a detrimental effect on productivity.
As well as “absenteeism”, an increased workload can lead to what is known as “presenteeism” – where the employee feels an obligation to go to work under any circumstances, even when ill or having an injury affecting their work. Again affecting productivity, this also causes tiredness and low morale, and maybe even illnesses being spread amongst work colleagues. So although turning up for work despite being ill may on first sight be an admirable thing to do, it’s not necessarily in the best interests of the individual, their colleagues nor the organisation.
Alongside “presenteeism” is “leavism”, with employees making themselves available during their time off, whether that be or vacations. Again, most likely caused by an unreasonable workload, the impact can be felt on the employee’s personal life, bringing problems at work, insomnia, using alcohol and such like.
Paid sick leave, short breaks during the day, flexible working times, job sharing, arrangements for sick cover and shift working are all policies to consider when looking at improving the well-being of employees.
We will now look at some useful steps that are relatively easy to implement as well as how technology can play a part in reducing work-related stress.
Some simple, practical first steps
Identifying the sources of potential stress in the workplace is the first step and, after that, putting in place measures to assist in removing or neutralising them, some examples of which are as follows:
Solutions using technology
Confronting the early signs and symptoms of stress is good business practice. This will affect both the ability of an organisation to recruit the best people as well as reduce the costs that are incurred as a result of work-related stress. Staff attraction and retention strategies are critical to the success of any organisation, and what happens in the workplace play a major part in both.
Whilst technology can have some negative effects on work-related stress, such as 24/7 availability through the widespread use of smartphones, less personal interaction with colleagues and the fear, real or otherwise, of job losses, it can of course deliver very significant benefits.
With email and instant messaging we can communicate with customers, suppliers and colleagues easier and faster than ever before. Improved computing power both in the office and through smartphones means we can increasingly perform tasks quicker and with greater accuracy. In addition to low cost, specialist video conferencing software most of us have video chat tools such as Skype or WhatsApp, making virtual meetings easily achievable, reducing time wasted travelling and attending face-to-face meetings aggravated by the need to dedicate office space to those meetings. All of these characteristics make life easier for workers and will hopefully reduce stress levels.
More specifically, certain software applications, although primarily designed to increase productivity, have a favourable impact on stress levels in the workplace. Team email collaboration software, such as CompassAir , is designed to make it easier for team members to work together, save time and be better organised.
Needless to say, work-related stress is unfortunately everywhere, but we are particularly aware of it in our own maritime sector. Shipping is a 24/7 business, it never sleeps. Some brokers for example handle thousands of emails a day, and missing an email or a deal can have huge financial consequences. In designing our software, we try to either remove or reduce the impact of the various pain points to which our clients are exposed, with the knock on effect of making their lives a little easier as well as more rewarding.
An example of one of our simplest, but very well used, features is “Notify Me“: it can be used to mark an important outgoing message, one where it is necessary that you see the reply as soon as it arrives. By marking it “Notify Me”, you will receive a notification on your smartphone as soon as it arrives in your inbox.
For more of an insight into team collaboration software, see our article explaining what it is and how it might benefit your organisation. Such software also serves to reduce email noise, facilitating the achievement of goals by cutting down on time spent dealing with emails which, by reducing stress, has a beneficial effect on the health and wellbeing of employees.
Allowing employees to work from home, flexible working, can also improve mental health, there being more control over one’s time, thus improving the work/life balance by, for example, removing some of the conflicts which arise, such as through needing to do school runs etc. Indeed, having the option to work from home is very important to the majority of millennials, and making that option available may prove critical when attempting to hire the best candidates.
Technology now makes it easier than ever to support remote working. With ease of communication through the use of video conferencing, instant messaging, email and screen sharing, such a policy is now much easier to implement. Applications that allow the sharing of documents are invaluable, again this includes our own CompassAir. The best known platforms dedicated to sharing include Dropbox and Google Docs, allowing both the creation and concurrent editing of documents by team members.
