What If Your Employer Actually Cared About The Stress They're Causing You?
The April, 2024, Northeast Business Group on Health (NEBGH) newsletter’s lead article is “Building Stress Tolerance as a Team.”
Articles of this sort, and there is a multitude of them, irritate me because they assign responsibility for solving a systemic problem—workplaces putting impossible demands on their employees—to the affected individuals. It’s a form of victim blaming.
These articles try to gaslight us into believing that individual employees burdened by overwhelmingly stressful workplace circumstances would be just fine if only they had more adequate stress management skills. They tell us—per the photo accompanying the article showing a woman in a serene yoga pose as six coworkers try to hand her work to do—that the problem isn’t the barrage of work you’re facing. No, the problem is that you aren’t yogi enough to blithely deal with the pressure.
Such articles treat us to all the well-worn recommendations for managing stress: prioritize, move more, eat more nutritious food, get enough rest, share your thoughts and feelings with supportive others, take walks in nature, etc. These are all great practices, but the fact is that human beings have limits and no matter how well you generally manage stress, too many workplaces will run roughshod over your breaking point.
For a few years I represented my Fortune 100 employer on the Conference Board’s Corporate Well-Being & Strategic Health Leadership Council. Before we assembled for our very first meeting, our Conference Board program director sent us a document whose first paragraph described the purpose of the council. It read something like this: Employees are being asked to do more with less, the pace of change is always increasing, technology makes it hard to separate work from the rest of life, and outsourcing and downsizing are a fact of life within many organizations. This council will work to develop and share best practices for promoting health and well-being within our workplaces.
When it was my turn to introduce myself to the group and share some thoughts, I said, “The solutions to the challenges that brought us together are right there within the description of our council’s purpose: employees need reasonable workloads; time, autonomy, and resources enough to do their work without always freeling pressured; some degree of control over the changes coming at them; personal time away from work; and job security.”
I added that I assumed it was unlikely that any of us in the group held sufficient power within our organizations to actually place these human needs on a par with profit making, and thus none of us could actually implement the solutions I mentioned. We’d have to settle, I said, with trying to help employees of our respective companies stay as healthy as possible within their current workplace realities because advocating too vehemently for real change. . . well, we all wanted to stay employed, after all.
My introductory comments at that first meeting were met with silence and some bemused smiles. As kind and respectful as my peers on the council were (they even invited me to give a presentation to them after I’d semi-retired and launched my business as a speaker and leadership advisor) I always felt like a bit of an outsider. I guess it would be accurate to expand the scope of that statement and say that I always felt a bit like an outsider during all of my 19 years in the corporate world.
Leaders at all organizational levels are not entirely powerless, however, when it comes to creating workplaces in which the stress experienced by their employees is less than overwhelming. Knowing exactly what’s expected of the employees who report directly to you and knowing whether or not their workloads are reasonable is key. The willingness to negotiate deliverable timelines, prioritize (and sometimes eliminate) work activities, and provide ongoing performance management are also essential. Finally and often most important: having the courage to set limits with your own supervisor regarding the amount of work expected from your team. Superb leaders prevent their teams from being overloaded by unreasonable demands that come from the organization’s higher ups.
Unfortunately, and as I described in my previous post, we find too little superb leadership in our workplaces.
I recall a story told by a friend. He was asked to evaluate the risk for dangerousness of a man who was observed cursing while kicking and punching a vending machine. His supervisor, terrified by what had occurred, told my friend he could not imagine what had sparked this behavior.
During his interview with my friend, the man apologized repeatedly for his behavior. “I have no excuse, but I guess I just lost it. I had been working mandatory double shifts for nearly two weeks straight and was counting on spending Friday evening with friends. Then my supervisor told me I’d have to work a double shift on Friday too. I just lost it.”
After the interview, my friend assured the man’s supervisor that there was no need to fear that this man would hurt anyone.
That the supervisor had no idea what had sparked this outburst and had so little personal connection with his team member that he’d been afraid to approach and ask him what was going on tells us so much, and none of it’s good.
In another situation in which I was directly involved, Ralph, a man in his early 40s, came to see me for coaching. He said, “I’d like you to help me get off my butt and find a new job. I used to be one of 10 tech professionals on our team. We service international business groups and we used to be scheduled to be on call an evening, weekend, or overnight periodically. A couple of months ago our team got downsized to only five people, and one of the five went out on disability a little after this happened. The four of us on the team are now on call always. . . all day, all night, and every weekend. I’ll be coaching my kid’s soccer practice or game and get a call that makes it so I have to go home, get on my computer, and work for several hours on a problem happening in Taiwan or Japan or Brazil or wherever. I’m done with this. I know I can get another job because I’m confident in my skills and always get great performance reviews. I just need to get my resume updated, refresh my network contacts, and get going on this.”
Coincidentally, a few days later I found myself in a meeting with six tech executives. One of them mentioned that he had recently had a downsizing in his area that resulted in a team of ten being reduced to five. This team was now down to four because one person was currently on disability. It was clear to me that he was talking about Ralph’s team.
I asked him how that team was doing. He said they were doing fine. I asked him how he knew they were doing fine. His response was, “Nobody’s complaining.”
I asked him to imagine how likely it would be for a person who needed their job to complain after their area had been downsized. This opened a conversation that focused on a number of aspects of leadership.
Ralph was able to quickly find a job within another company that afforded him a life outside work.
On a more upbeat note, one morning Andy, my boss at the time, came into my office and said, “All of us on our leadership team have been given a lot of unexpected work to do because of the legal changes associated with our department’s new status within the organization. I’d like you to postpone the RFP for the external EAP that you’ve started working on until next year because it’s too much to take that on at the same time.” I will always remember that moment as a demonstration of great leadership.
Some points to consider:
Stress overload exacerbates all health problems and greatly increases the incidence of employee disability.
Stress overload prompts some employees, often the most competent and self-assured ones like Ralph, to seek employment elsewhere.
Employee turnover, whether a result of disability or choice, is extremely costly to an organization.
Stress overload can prompt some people—even those who have no history of violence and no likelihood of harming others— to act out in ways that are frightening.
Wise leaders know something about how their team members are feeling about their work and do everything possible to minimize stress created by the work environment.
Heightened stress can drive a host of additional problems, including employee burnout, absenteeism, presenteeism, human errors, interpersonal conflicts, grievances, sabotage, and negative publicity for the organization.
Creating an organization that minimizes employee stress is not rocket science. It does, however, require placing the needs of human beings on a level of priority equal to the profit motive.
For more listen to my interview with Dr. Jeffrey Pfeffer, author of Dying For A Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—and What We Can Do About It .
Blowing the Whistle on Workplace Crazy: True stories (with names and other identifiers changed to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent) and commentary from a mental health expert/leadership advisor/retired corporate executive. Crazy=bizarre, unexpected, sometimes darkly humorous.
Send your workplace stories to me at kenddv@gmail.com with the subject line, “Workplace Crazy.” I’ll share (minus identifying details per your instructions) and respond to them here.