There is increasing recognition that work-related stress and burnout presents a significant cost to individual health and wellbeing, and in lost productivity to the workforce.
Work-related stress can occur when there is an imbalance between workplace conditions and pressures and our perceived ability and capacity to cope with these.
While stress can be a normal response to encountering a stressful situation, when stress is left unmanaged it can have detrimental consequences to our psychological and physical health and ultimately lead to burnout.
If we don’t have strategies for releasing stress it can build to destructive levels. Let’s imagine that something occurs in your day that really gets your heart rate pounding - a normal reaction to a normal stressful event.
If you have strategies to help you manage that reaction (maybe a walk, a few deep breaths, a laugh with a colleague) then you can release the pressure before it gets to a dangerous level.
However, if that pressure is unrelenting and you don’t have the time or opportunity to effectively release it, then stress can accumulate to dangerous levels. Then if there is a heart-pounding incident, the reaction can be magnified to crisis level or having an ‘abnormal’ reaction to a ‘normal’ event.
In some industries, there is shame and stigma around admitting to ‘not coping’.
Further, we know through research that stressful working conditions can restrict our ability to implement positive lifestyle changes and reinforce negative behaviours, thereby negating intervention attempts. Because of this, individual-level interventions such as exercise programs may not be effective in reducing stress.
Work-related stress costs the Australian economy an estimated $14.81 billion each year, with associated presenteeism and absenteeism having a direct cost to employers of over $10 billion. (Medibank Report)
According to the 2020 Productivity Commission, mental stress compensation claims outweigh all other claims across the Australian working population by three times and is rising significantly.
To improve the outcomes on mental health, we should aim to prevent stress from occurring in the first place, rather than managing it after it happens. When we invest our efforts in a primary prevention approach, such as creating a positive work culture with high psychological safety, the work-related factors that contribute to stress are managed and employees feel comfortable to openly discuss work-related stress, and ask for assistance and resources in order to prevent cumulative stress and burnout.
Ways to do this are:
Undertake careful (or SMART) job design to ensure that adverse working conditions that can contribute to stress are managed. Consider: appropriate work demands, reasonable deadlines, autonomy over decision making and available support systems.
Focus on leadership approach and creating a strong sense of relationship so employees feel comfortable asking for additional support or seeking adjustments if they require it.
Ensure leaders engage in regular discussions with individual employees to assess how they are managing the available demands of their work and the resources available. By reinforcing that stress is not an indicator of ‘not coping’, leaders will encourage employees to speak up and reduce the stigma talking about mental health.
Call To Action
Supporting your managers and leaders to regularly discuss the flow of work with their employees and to look for signs of stress will help prevent a heightened stress reaction and burnout.
This may require you to schedule in these discussions and to help your people leaders to recognise the symptoms of stress.
Of course, adequate development of leadership capability will underpin this to ensure conversations are productive.
TAKING IT FURTHER
Often workflow follows a certain pattern, particularly around RDOs, annual holidays and breaks. This is no surprise and we can predict work pressure. Equally, projects will have their pressure points so the potential stress points are no surprise.
Using a risk management lens by doing things like running hypotheticals in the early stages of a project (e.g. what happens if three of our senior leaders are needed for a tender/important opportunity etc) can help you mitigate the risk of burning out your key players and help you take a proactive approach to stress management.