Stress at Work

Are you stressed?

Stress is often under-evaluated and under-considered in looking at work conditions, but it is an essential hold-back to perform for many. The stress response begins with a stressor that triggers many mind and body activities. A stressor is a physical or psychological stimulus.

At work, an example of stressors can be task demands, role demands, physical demands, and interpersonal demands. A stress response is the unconscious mobilization of the body in response to the stressor, which activates the sympathetic nervous and endocrine systems.

While the employees can experience stress caused by the uncertainty of the psycho-social and physical work environment, the effects of stress on an organization can be devastating. These can lead to dysfunctionality within the organization and add direct costs such as turnover and absenteeism and indirect costs such as poor morale and job dissatisfaction. The good news is that not all stress is harmful. Eustress refers to properly managed stress that leads to positive outcomes with elevated performance. Higher stress triggered by new and stimulated tasks leads to higher performance. High-performance, underused employees are more likely to quit than optimally used employees.

Because there is an interdependency between the employee and the organization, the individuals need to be healthy to maintain their productivity, so avoiding stress is a significant component of preventive management measures. In addition, individuals cannot perform well in a toxic work environment, so the efforts to ensure a healthy environment starts with identifying the stressors. Mangers should implement a preventive stress management system with principles promoting the employee and organization's health. They should first focus on identifying and modifying the stressors, such as workload, lack of support, or clarity. Then, the managers should look at the stress responses and how these can be changed from an employee's and organization's responses.

The strain caused by stressors directly impacts the employees, and as the transactional theory of stress suggests, each individual reacts differently to stress. These can become hindrances or opportunities for growth and learning. Managers and leaders should focus on monitoring stress by applying preventive measures such as re-designing certain jobs to enhance motivation and reduce the level of uncertainty. For example, they could encourage an individual in an admin position to take on tasks that he/she seems to be talented at for an additional bonus or perk.

Take a work event such as task-do-report and modify the flow to task-do-review-do-report-feedback. Managers could alleviate stress by optimizing the understanding of the task, offering proper tools and information to complete the task, mentoring and encouraging task completion, and offering feedback on growth and quality enhancement. Through collaboration and early detection of stressors, the stress can be maintained at optimal levels. The key elements for positively influencing employees are providing feedback and performance monitoring. Many stressful issues can be allocated by clear and explicit use of the feedback information.

Reference:

Quick, C. James, A. Thomas Wright, A. Joyce Adkins, L. Debra Nelson, and Jonathan Quicl. Preventive Stress Management in Organizations. 2nd edition., 2013.