Stress and well-being at work - the costs and challenges 

Prof. Dr. Cary Cooper
Organisational Psychology and Health, Management School Lancaster University, United Kingdom 

The enterprise culture of the 1980s, and the Americanized workforce of the 1990s and early 2000s helped to transform the economies of the developed world. But, as we were to discover, by the end of these decades, there was a substantial personal cost for many individual employees. This cost was captured by a single word – stress.


Indeed, stress has found a firm place in our modern lexicon as iPods; CD’s and carbon footprint! We use the term casually to describe a wide range of aches and pains resulting from our hectic pace of work and domestic life. "I feel really stressed" someone says to describe a vague yet often acute sense of disquiet. "She’s under a lot of stress", we say when trying to understand a colleague’s irritability.  "It’s a high-stress job", someone says, awarding an odd sort of prestige to his or her occupation. But to those whose ability to cope with day-to-day matters is at crisis point, the concept of stress is no longer a casual one; for them, stress can have significant health consequences.  We are now confronted by an even more pernicious scenario, a major economic down turn, with its’ attendant stressors of job insecurity, financial worries and presenteeism behaviours. (Cooper, 2005).

The cost of stress 
 
These excessive pressures in the workplace are very costly to business. In 2004, the Chartered Institute of Personnel found for the first time that workplace stress accounted for the largest amount of long term sickness absence in the UK economy than from any other cause. If some of the other stress-related categories are added (poor workplace morale, impact of long hours, personal problems) it was the most significant bottom line cost to UK.   The estimates by the CBI (2007), CIPD (2007), Sainsbury Centre (2007) for Mental Health and others of the costs of stress-related absenteeism and presenteeism (employees being present at work but not contributing to the bottom-line) range from £2 billion to over £20 billion depending on whether they are direct (e.g. job absence) and/or indirect costs (e.g. lack of  added value to products and services, costs of the NHS repairing people damaged by work).  In addition, 40% of incapacity benefit from work in the UK is due to mental ill health and stress in the workplace, which amounts to approximately £5b per annum.

There has been a major restructuring of the workforce, both in the private and public sectors towards what is euphemistically called the "flexible workforce". Britain led the way in Europe towards "privatising" the public sector in the 80s, "downsizing" the private sector during the downturn of the late 80s/early 90s, "outsourcing" many of its corporate functions in the 90s, and creating long hours and "presenteeism" culture at the beginning of the new millennium. However, this scenario of 'leaner' organisations, intrinsic job insecurity and a culture of longer working hours are beginning to have an adverse effect on employee attitudes and behaviour.

A major Quality of Working Life (QWL) survey  (Worrall & Cooper, 2001) of a cohort of  5,000 British managers in the private and public sector found that these changes – downsizing, outsourcing, delayering and the like – led to substantially increased job insecurity, lowered morale and, most important of all, the erosion of motivation and loyalty. Although some of these changes were perceived to have led to an increase in profitability and productivity, decision-making was slower and the organisation was shown to have lost the right mix of human resource skills and experience in the process.

More worrying about this trend was the major increase in working hours and the impact of this on the health and well being of managers and their families. The survey found that 81 per cent of managers in the public and private sectors worked more than 40-hour weeks, 32 per cent more than 50 hours and 10 per cent more that 60 hours a week. Also, a substantial minority frequently worked at weekends. This trend has remained even over the last 5 years, with the latest Quality of Working Life survey (Worrall and Cooper, 2007) of a cohort of 10,000 managers from junior to Board level, showing a sustained deterioration of employee well-being even during this period of economic growth.

What is so disturbing about this trend towards a long-hours culture is the managers’ perception of the damage it is inflicting on them and their families. The 2007 survey showed that 56 per cent of the executives reported that these long hours damaged their health; 54 per cent said that they adversely affected their relationship with their children; 59 per cent that they damaged their relationship with their partner, 46 per cent that long hours reduced their productivity and 64% said that it was ruining their social life.

Another manifestation is the increasing levels of job insecurity in the UK.  An ISR survey (ISR, 2000) across Europe found that in 1985 70% of British workers felt job secure but by 2000 that figure had dropped to just over 45%.  In the QWL survey in 2007, 66%, of a cohort of 10,000 managers, reported that as a result of all the changes that had taken place in their organizations they now felt significantly less job secure.  And we now know, from recent research that if people are not job satisfied they can get ill, with job insecurity being one of the most significant aspects of job satisfaction (Faragher, Cass and Cooper, 2005).

The big questions about these developments are: is the trend toward short-term contracts, long hours and intrinsically job-insecure workplaces the way forward for us? How will this affect the health and well-being of employees? Can organisations continue to demand commitment from employees they don’t commit to? What will this long hours culture do to the two-earner family, which is now the majority family in Europe? In comparative terms, the European economies have done remarkably well, but now that we are in a downturn the levels of job insecurity and concerns about the future of the economy are high and growing. Developing and maintaining a 'feel good' factor at work, and in our economies generally, is not just about the bottom line factor – profitability. In a civilised society the feel good factor should include quality of life issues as well, like hours of work, family time, manageable workloads, control over one’s career and some sense of job security.

A strategy for managing stress in a changing workforce

How should organisations manage the pressures currently experienced by their employees in a changing workplace culture? Cartwright and Cooper, (1997) suggested a three-pronged strategy for stress management in organisations. For the prevention and management of stress at work, the following three approaches could provide a comprehensive strategic framework: primary (e.g. stress reduction), secondary (e.g. stress management) and tertiary prevention (e.g. employee assistance programmes/workplace counselling).

Primary prevention is concerned with taking action to modify or eliminate sources of stress inherent in the work environment, so reducing their negative impact on the individual. The focus of primary interventions is in adapting the environment to 'fit' the individual.

Possible strategies to reduce workplace stress factors include:

• Redesigning the task
• Redesigning the working environment
• Establishing flexible work schedules
• Encouraging participative management
• Including the employee in career development
• Analysing work roles and establishing goals
• Providing social support and response
• Building cohesive teams
• Establishing fair employment policies
• Sharing rewards

Primary intervention strategies are often a vehicle for culture change. The type of action required by an organisation will vary according to the kind of stress factors operating. Any intervention, therefore, needs to be guided by prior diagnosis or a stress audit (Faragher, Cartwright and Cooper, 2004), or risk assessment, to identify the specific factors responsible for employee stress, as per the UK’s Health and Safety Executive’s Management Standards on Stress (www.hse.gov.uk).

Secondary prevention is concerned with the prompt detection and management of experienced stress. This can be done by increasing awareness and improving the stress management skills of the individual through training and educative activities. Individual factors can alter or modify the way employees, exposed to workplace stress, perceive and react to their environment. Each individual has his or her own personal stress threshold, which is why some people thrive in a certain setting and others suffer (Palmer and Cooper, 2007).

Awareness activities and skills training programmes, designed to improve relations techniques, cognitive coping skills and work/lifestyle modification skills (e.g. time management courses or assertiveness training), have an important part to play in extending the individual’s physical and psychological resources. The role of secondary prevention is, however, one of damage limitation. Often the consequences, rather than the sources of stress, which may be inherent in the organisation’s structure or culture, are being dealt with. They are concerned with improving the 'adaptability' of the individual to the environment. Consequently, this type of intervention is often described as 'the band aid' approach. The implicit assumption is that the organisation will not change but continue to be stressful, therefore the individual has to develop and strengthen his or her resistance to that stress.

Tertiary prevention is concerned with the treatment, rehabilitation and recovery process of individuals who have suffered, or are suffering, from serious ill health as a result of stress.

Intervention at the tertiary level typically involves provision of counselling services for employee problems in the work or personal domain. Such services are provided either by in-house counsellors or outside agencies, which provide counselling, information and/or referral to appropriate treatment and support services. There is evidence to suggest that counselling is effective in improving the psychological well being of employees and has considerable cost benefits.

The future

The pressures on all of us are likely to get worse. Stress is primarily caused by the fundamentals of change, lack of control, high workload, job insecurity and fears for the economy (Weinberg and Cooper, 2006).

Change has been the byword of the first part of this millennium, with its job insecurities, corporate culture clashes and significantly different styles of managerial leadership – in other words, massive organisational change and inevitable stress. In addition, change still brings with it an increased workload as companies try to create 'fighting machines' to compete in international economic arenas and public sector bodies try to reduce their wage bills in a tightened budgetary round. This will mean fewer people performing more work in more job-insecure environments.

Finally, as we move away from our own internal markets and enter larger economic systems, individual organisations will have less control over business life. Rules and regulations are beginning to be imposed in terms of labour laws; health and safety at work; methods of production, distribution and remuneration and so on. These are all laudable issues of concern in their own right, but, nevertheless, these workplace constraints will inhibit individual control and autonomy.

Without being too gloomy, it is safe to say that we have, at the start of this millennium, all the ingredients of corporate stress: an ever-increasing workload with a decreasing workforce in a climate of rapid change and with control over the means of production increasingly being exercised by bigger bureaucracies, with a downturn in the economy undermining individual stability and job security.

It appears, therefore, that stress is here to stay and cannot be dismissed as simply a bygone remnant of the entrepreneurial 1980s and 1990s.  The challenge for human resource management in the future is to understand a basic truth about human behaviour that developing and maintaining a 'feel good' factor at work and in our economy generally is not just about 'bottom line' factors (e.g. higher salaries or increased profitability).  It is, or should be, in a civilized society, about quality of life issues as well, such as hours of work, family time, manageable workloads, control over one’s career and some sense of job security.  As the social anthropologist Studs Terkel (1972) suggested in his book "Working", "work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor, in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying".

REFERENCES:

Cartwright, S. and Cooper, C.L. (1997).  Managing workplace Stress.  California & London: Sage Publ.

Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (2007). Absence management. London: CIPD

Confederation of Business Industry (2007). Attending to absence: absence and labour turnover survey. London: CBI.

Cooper, C.L. (2005).  Handbook of Stress Medicine and Health. Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press

Faragher, B., Cass, C, and Cooper, C.L. (2005).  The relationship between job satisfaction and health: a meta-analysis. Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 62, pp. 105-112.

Faragher, B., Cooper, C.L. and Cartwright, S. (2004). A shortened stress evaluation tool (ASSET).  Stress and Health, 20 (4), pp. 189-203.

ISR (2000). European Trends. London: ISR.

Palmer, S. & Cooper, C., How to Deal with Stress, London, 2007

Quick, J., et al Managing Executive Health, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008

Quick, J., Cooper, C.L., Gavin, J. and Quick, J.D. (2008).  Managing Executive Health: Personal and Corporate Strategies for Sustained Success.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health (2007).  Mental health at work: Developing the business case.  London: Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health.

Terkel, S. (1972).  Working.  New York: Avon Books.

Weinberg, A, and Cooper, C.L. (2006). Surviving the Workplace:A Guide to Emotional Well Being.  London: Thomson

Worrall, L. & Cooper, C.L. (2001). Quality of working life survey. London: Chartered Management Survey.

Worrall, L. & Cooper, C.L. (2007). Quality of work life survey: managers’ health, motivation and productivity.  London: Chartered Management Survey