How to deal with work stress

Ross Davies explains how to tackle stress in the workplace.

‘You may imagine my toil and occupation when I tell you that within the last fortnight I have given order [….] that I will see no one [….] on Tuesday[s] Thursdays or Saturdays or on other days after 4 [pm] let them be who they will.’

This was the complaint of a 45-year-old Michael Faraday, who in a letter of 1836 newly-acquired by IEE, explains, ‘I have not made an experiment of research of my own for the last two months and I find myself engaged in everybody’s business but my own’.

The ‘father of electricity’ had already discovered electromagnetic induction (1831), and was now immersed, perhaps even drowning, in formulating his ideas on the nature of electricity. Faraday’s tetchiness suggests that he is suffering from what nowadays we would call ‘workplace’ or ‘work-related stress’, which Bill Callaghan, chairman of the Health & Safety Executive (HSE), describes as ‘the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressure or other types of demand placed on them’.

Excessive pressure

In 1836, Faraday was facing demands that he evidently found ‘excessive’. From late 1835, his ‘own business’ had been the series of experiments that would lead to his groundbreaking paper of 1837 on electrostatic induction. Faraday dared not rush to publish, so concerned was he to avoid any mistakes critics could seize upon in his sure-to-be-controversial theory that electricity is a force and not a fluid.

But these experiments had to compete for time with Faraday’s many professional duties. He was an adviser to the nation’s lighthouse keeper, Trinity House. He was also a consultant to the Admiralty, among others. Then there were his regular lectures and other duties at the Royal Institution.

In 1836, ‘stress’ was something materials were subjected to, not people. Today, work-related stress, or excessive strain upon an individual leading to impaired performance and sickness, is fast moving up the list of management priorities. HSE, for example, has updated its management standards for workplace stress, and produced an online toolkit which enables an employer to benchmark performance against best industry practice. Many professional associations for managers also have online checklists, tool kits or other benchmarking aids.

Stress management

Observance of the standards is voluntary, but an employer that does not follow them or have a stress management scheme of their own risks being served with an enforcement notice for breach of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974.

So far, a ‘handful’ of enforcement notices has been served, HSE says, but no prosecutions are under way. The Government is reluctant to legislate specifically on stress, says Jane Kennedy, Minister for Work. ‘Stress is not necessarily work-related, so it’s complicated to legislate for at work,’ Ms Kennedy adds.

Employers, the Minister points out, already have a duty under law to do what they reasonably can to assess health and safety risks, and to ensure the health, safety and welfare of employees at work. The duty to assess for health and safety risks under the Management of Health and Safety at Work regulations 1999. Both risks and duties therefore include work-related stress.

The HSE standards are the embodiment of the Government’s policy on work-related stress, although Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry cites stress levels and the long-hours culture as a reason for reimbursing around 60% of all maternity, paternity and adoption leave that employees take. Ms Hewitt also sees flexible working as a de-stressor.

By HSE’s calculation, work-related stress has now replaced musculoskeletal disorders (muscles, joints and tendons) as the single biggest cause of working days lost through injury or ill-health. In total, over 13 million days are now lost in UK industry each year. That’s about one million days more than are due to musculoskeletal causes. Stress costs an estimated £3.7 billion a year in lost working time, and according to the Labour Force Survey, over 500,000 people claim to suffer stress at levels that make them ill.

What is stress?

Absenteeism, decreased productivity, poor judgement. Decline in product quality and poor customer care. Lack of creativity, accidents, expensive and highly-publicised litigation, fines and compensation awards, all are consequences of failure to deal with work-related stress among employees.

‘What people need to understand is that that stress isn't something that will simply go away if left to its own devices,’ says Dr Ray White, chairman of the International Stress Management Association UK.

What, then are the signs of work-related stress, and where do you look for them? In both cases, it seems, you should be alert for sudden or uncharacteristic behaviour. ‘In teams or organisations,’ says Petra Cook, head of policy at the Chartered Management Institute, ‘signs of stress can include lower commitment, missed deadlines, reluctance to communicate, increased conflicts and absenteeism’.

These five problems are among the signs of stress in the individual as well, although Christine Hayhurst, Director of Professional Affairs at the Chartered Management Institute, adds others such as ‘finding solace in other parts of life, drinking more heavily, drugs’.

Stress, caused or exacerbated by work pressures, can make people ill, physically or mentally. It is a statutory duty to protect employees’ health, and therefore to do everything reasonable to reduce work-related stress. But how?

If ‘sudden changes in behaviour’ are the warning signals of work-related stress in a team or individual, ‘working together’ seems to be the foundation of successful stress management. At HSE, Bill Callaghan says, ‘The management Standards have been built on a foundation of partnership and require employers, employees and representatives to work together if stress is going to be tackled effectively.’

Signs and signals

A company’s risk assessment programme should be widened to include work-related stress, if it does not already do so. It’s then a question of recognising the warning signs in individuals, teams or organisations. Next, maintaining perspective and balance, comes the taking of practical steps to remove causes of stress. If channels of communication with employees are kept open, they will soon tell you what the causes are.

However rudimentary the company’s stress management programme, it may be ahead of the competition. One electronic manufacturing company declines to discuss its policy because it doesn’t have one. ‘While we have a health component to our management programmes for employees, there is no specific stress content,’ this company says.

At MITIE Engineering Services, managers are now trained to look for signs of stress, identify the causes and, where possible, ease the pressures, says managing director, Colin Acheson. Prevention’s even better than cure, Mr Acheson finds, and one of MITIE’s first steps was to realise that managers can’t sit around and wait for employees to come to them complaining of workplace stress. MITIE runs staff surveys on topics such as work/life balance as well as work-related stress as a way of monitoring employee satisfaction and highlighting problems.

‘Engineering services is still a heavily male-dominated, industry, and therefore one in which there is a culture in which stress sufferers do not like to acknowledge or discuss a condition that they see and expect others to see as ‘weakness’,’ says one MITIE employee. ‘As in any project-related industry, the pressure to work to deadlines can be a stress generator, and that combines with the industry’s male culture. We can’t stop this being a project-related industry, but if workplace stress is caught early enough, it’s possible to fix it before a department’s performance suffers or the employee descends into stress-induced illness.’

There is no one infallible sign of stress, MITIE says. ‘What sets alarm bells ringing is a sudden change in an individual’s usual behaviour. He or she might become withdrawn or overly argumentative, for example, but whatever the behaviour, the key is the change rather than its nature.

With Shell Global Solutions, a consultancy and technology/R&D licensing concern, however, managers piloting the HSE standards during the consultation stage found that it was not ‘male culture’ that was an issue. It was the difficulty of spotting behavioural changes.

‘Shell has had a stress awareness programme for all employees for five years now, and people feel free to discuss workplace stress,’ says Josey Snowden, health and safety adviser, Shell Global solutions (UK). There is also a confidential helpline, which an employee can ring for stress counselling.

On the other hand, Josey Snowden explains, SGS works through ‘virtual teams’, even a small one of which might have members in the UK, the Netherlands, the US and Malaysia. ‘Virtual teams can be a stressor, because you cannot have the same day-to-day contact with colleagues as you would if you were all in the same place – a lot of contact has to be through telephone, video-conferencing and e mail. In virtual teams, therefore, it can be harder to notice the small changes in behavioural patterns than if you were all in the same location.’

Tackling stress proactively

One promising way to get round this difficulty has emerged from an experimental focus group, which SGS set up in one of its locations. The members, a cross-section of employees, all work at one site, although they answer to managers in a number of countries. Josey Snowden, it was agreed, would be the focus group ‘facilitator’, for as a health and safety adviser, she was seen to be both knowledgeable and impartial.

‘We identified causes of stress and then how to rectify them, and it became clear that the people best placed to put things right are the people under stress. The people themselves came up with the ideas on how to resolve their problem, and their managers, wherever they were, were kept informed of the focus group’s findings,’ she says.

Heidi Lee of aerospace and transport group Bombardier explains, ‘Our line managers say that one of the principal causes of workplace stress among employees is the difficulty in communicating change in the organisation. The problem is that we’re in an industry that has to change a lot – that’s the nature of our business. We ran a pilot study on the new stress management guidelines for the health and safety consultation (H&SC) and our managers reported that a leading cause of workplace stress was of the constantly-changing nature of our business.’

Constant change is beyond Bombardier’s control, but the group concludes that it can do more to manage that change, in the sense of reducing stress levels. One way is to explain more fully and more frequently what changes are under way, what’s expected of the individual employee, and where he or she fits in.

‘We're also training managers in how to spot the early signs of stress in the individual, and to respond faster and better to help employees,’ Heidi continues. But Bombardier, she adds, is also managing workplace stress by making better use of an existing resource, one highlighted by the H&SC pilot as capable of improvement.

‘We’ve had a team briefing and consultation system for some time, and we’re now using it a lot more to keep our staff informed of what’s happening within our organisation.’

There was no team briefing and consultation for Michael Faraday back in 1836. Although he had a devoted wife, Sarah, and many friends, the anxiety that there was never enough time to devote to his own work was to dog the driven genius throughout life.

The cure for what we now call work-related stress was one discovery Faraday was fated not to make. Within a decade of his 1836 letter, ‘stress’ as a description applied to a bodily organ or mental power rather than to a material object had entered the language. But by this time, Faraday had suffered a breakdown.

Possible causes of work-related stress

Poor working relationships
Bullying or harassment
Lack of training
Poor or inconsistent management
Organisational or technological change
Unreasonable time pressures or deadlines
Poor working conditions
Mismatch between tasks and resources
Irregular or long hours
Lack of feedback or acknowledgement
Lack of job security

[Source: ACAS]

Work-related stress: what are the signs?

Work performance:

declining/inconsistent performance
loss of motivation/commitment
indecision
lapses in memory
increased time at work
don't plan/take holidays

Regression:

crying
arguments
undue sensitivity
irritability/moodiness
over-reaction to problems
personality clashes

Withdrawal:

arriving late for work
leaving early
taking long lunches
absenteeism
resigned attitude

Aggressive behaviour:

malicious gossip
criticism of others
vandalism
bullying or harassment
temper outbursts

Other:

being out of character
difficulty in relaxing
drinking alcohol/increased smoking
lack of interest in appearance/hygiene
accidents at home or work
unnecessary risk taking

Physical signs:

nervous stumbling speech
sweating
tiredness/lethargy
upset stomach/flatulence
tension headaches
rapid weight gain or loss

[Source: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development]

First published in Engineering Management, Feb/Mar 2005, with thanks to Dr Ross Davies, a communications consultant and writer on business, education and training.

OTHER INTERNET RESOURCES:

From the IET