Managing Workplace Stress

Workplace stress is so common that it’s practically a cliche, and for understandable and sometimes even good reasons.

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After all, most of us want the work we do to make a meaningful contribution to the team and company’s overall efforts. We want to come through for our coworkers and managers alike and deliver on the expectations that seek to meet. Wanting to do a good job can be admirable.

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But that desire to succeed of course is always coupled with the possibility of falling short, and when you’re fulfilling a function that is critical to the group mission, falling short can lead to consequences that range from internalized feelings of guilt or shame to major negative outcomes for the business and/or the loss of your livelihood and means for supporting your current standard of living.

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These are very high stakes, and high stakes can lead to high levels of stress, so it’s no surprise that workplaces are going to consistently serve as very efficient factories for manufacturing especially high stress levels.

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What may be more surprising is how unhealthy and dangerous those high levels of stress can be, but according to the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) workplace stress is directly responsible for 120 thousand deaths a year.

In fact, the relationship between stress and health is so well documented that the police forces in some of the biggest cities in the United States - including New York City  and Los Angeles - will attribute any heart attack or other coronary event experienced by an office as a work-related injury, whether the officer is on the job at the time of the event or on vacation, sleeping in a hammock on a beach thousands of miles outside their jurisdiction. Hypertension is another condition with widely acknowledged and documented ties to stress.

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Beyond negatively affecting the health and well-being of the employees experiencing it, workplace stress tends to have a number of negative effects at a company level, as well. For one, job performance goes down on an individual basis, which of course can hamper company workflow and output and will have compounded effects in workplaces where the problem is more widespread. Stress will similarly diminish productivity and employee communication, as well as inhibit highly stressed employees’ physical capability and their ability to function consistently day to day. 

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While workplace stress is unfortunately commonplace, however, it is not equally experienced across all industries and the levels of stress involved can play a significant role in determining the severity of the outcome. The healthcare, finance, construction, and education industries register higher levels of stress on average than most industries, for example.

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Where a person falls within their company hierarchy also impacts the average level of stress they experience, with 14% of managers on the top hierarchical tiers experiencing high levels of stress as a result of higher levels of responsibility for both the work product and the people who help produce it. Workers on the lowest levels of the corporate ladder experience the next greatest amount of stress following those on the uppermost rungs, with 10% of interns and temp workers reporting high levels of stress from uncertainty and a lack of control over their work and position within the organization. 

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In one study by CommPsych involving a survey of North American employees across a variety of industries that inquired about the primary sources of workplace stress, the largest proportion of respondents cited workload as the main generator of their stress at 41%, followed by 32% of respondents who pointed to interpersonal issues, 18% who blame their work-life balancing act, and 9% whose stress was driven by concerns about job security.

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Clearly, workplace stress is having an outsized effect on the people who experience it as well as the companies where they are employed. And with the stakes as high as they are in terms of health and success both for the afflicted individuals and the companies they work for, the responsibility must fall on all parties involved in order to minimize workplace stress and the negative impacts that always come with it. 

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You can read more about this topic here.

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