Under pressure: Coping with stress

/ 01 January 2010

Stress can affect anyone, but spotting the signs in one of your employees, and knowing what to do about it, is a real skill. The trick is to create the right balance, reports Sue Weekes

Stress, said the endocrinologist Dr Hans Selye, is much like Einstein’s theory of relativity: it’s a scientific concept that has suffered from the “mixed blessing of being too well known and too little understood”. The words of Dr Selye, who did much to define the condition and is considered the father of stress research, go a long way to explaining why stress has become such a challenge in modern society and today’s workplace.

Describing ourselves as ‘stressed out’ is as much a part of common parlance as ‘I'm hungry’, but, unlike the latter condition, when we are stressed we don’t really understand what our bodies are telling us and what they need.

“Being in a state of stress impacts on how the body functions,” says Neil Shah, director of the Stress Management Society, which helps companies and individuals to combat the condition. “The body was never designed to be in a state of stress for an extended period of time – it’s a short-term fight or flight response.”

On the other hand, stress can sometimes have a positive effect. Back in 1908, Harvard researchers Robert M Yerkes and John D Dodson showed that there is a correlation between an increase in stress and a rise in efficiency and performance. However, they also found that when stress levels pass a certain point, performance declines.

With so many differing views on offer, it’s clear that stress management, whether for yourself or your team, is never going to be black and white. Identifying this pressure point among staff is a major challenge for managers. It doesn’t help, says Shah, that people talk about “good and bad stress”, which assumes there are different types. “That’s rubbish and misleading. There’s only one type of stress and one type of response, it’s whether stress is an appropriate or inappropriate response,” he says. “Classic situations where stress is designed to help you include being chased by a dog, running for a bus or playing sport. Something such as having to do a presentation falls between two stools because a little bit of stress will make you sharper, but too much will mean you won’t be able to get your words out.”

Doing more with less

Alistair Dornan, practice leader of wellbeing at talent and career management consultancy Right Management, says that as we emerge from recession, managers may need to confront the issue of stress head on. “There’s a general perception in the HR community that we’re going to hit the upturn but when the orders fly in we’ll be five, 10, 15 people smaller in terms of head count,” he says. “The pressure is going to be significantly greater next year so we must make sure the management and the organisational design is able to support these people or we will see a significant explosion in stress-related problems.”

Most of us are not good at managing our stress levels. According to data collected for online health risk assessments by Right Management. Of 9,000 people assessed, 38% were in the high-risk category of not being able to manage stress, and 27% were in the medium- to high-risk category. Only 8.3% were found to be low-risk and, therefore, able to cope with stress and pressure.

Health worries

General statistics on stress make similarly uncomfortable reading for employers. A labour force survey by the Office for National Statistics shows that 442,000 people are suffering work-related stress at a level which is making them ill. The latest findings from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) show that over 13.5 million days are lost to stress each year, costing UK employers in the region of £4bn.

And the news that 24 people at telecommunications firm France Telecom have committed suicide since the beginning of 2008, with the most recent leaving a suicide note blaming the ‘atmosphere at work’, takes concern about stress to a heightened level when so many workforces are under pressure.

The HSE, which introduced management standards for work-related stress in 2004 to help organisations tackle the problem, says the UK is one of the most progressive nations in terms of preventing work-related stress. There is increased awareness of the standards in the HR community, but there is a lot of work still to be done. “As the incident rates and working days lost due to stress-related illness haven’t changed in recent years, it’s difficult to say that effective action is being taken,” says Tony Almond of the HSE’s work-related stress team.

The HSE plans to focus on line managers, which it sees as the members of staff who are key to successfully preventing stress-related problems in the workforce. Many others share this view. Claire Tyers, who leads the work, health and wellbeing research team at the Institute for Employment Studies, says line managers are the ‘ears and eyes’ of an organisation and are well placed to spot the danger signs of stress. But she adds that, all too often, managers are not given the training or support they need to perform the role. “They aren’t as confident or supported as much as they ought to be,” she says. “It’s about making sure they have the confidence to tackle those difficult conversations when they know someone is struggling.”

The bigger picture

There also needs to be a cultural change in how managers view stress management. Gordon Tinline, director of business psychologists Robertson Cooper and a chartered occupational psychologist, says stress management practices need to become more embedded in general management. “If you look at the [HSE] standards, what they are really about is good management: managing relationships and managing workloads,” he says. “I get a bit concerned when I hear managers say ‘I must do these stress management standards’ as if they are completely separate from what they should already be doing.”

Managers might be more inclined to see stress management as a vital element of their activity if internal communication about wellbeing was part of the core organisational strategy. Dornan believes that those leading the initiatives need to demonstrate the link between a happier, healthier workforce and optimal performance. “Many organisations think wellbeing is about mung beans, gym membership and lentils,” says Dornan. “HR looks after it, but then gives it to the occupational health (OH) department, which says ‘let’s run a cholesterol testing day’.“Because of that inability to articulate wellness in terms of organisational parameters, a lot of companies are seeing budget cuts in this area. People say to me, ‘I talk wellness and the CEO switches off; I talk numbers, they get it’.”

People charged with putting stress management strategies in place are starting to gather the ammunition they need to approach the board and demonstrate the business benefits of these schemes. Organisations have more resources to validate their approach to stress management, including Dame Carol Black’s Working for a Healthier Tomorrow report, the Boorman Review on Health and Wellbeing in the NHS, and Business in the Community’s Business Action on Health campaign.

Tyers acknowledges that we are living through difficult economic times, but says the business message must get through to the board, with an emphasis on preventative strategies and not just treatment. “It is a difficult thing to get right, so organisations with good preventative practices are quite rare. They can be slow to come to fruition and often commitment will waver halfway through,” she says. “In this climate, making the argument at board level is increasingly difficult, but we have to tackle it. Initiatives must come from the top down and we need to see support and training for line managers so it can also work from the bottom up.”

Survival instinct

Making the business case relies on acquiring good metrics, and absence management is an obvious area. However, some experts fear that a return to presenteeism, where people come into work even when they are too ill to do so because of pressure of workload and fear about job security, could skew these results. “If absence is the main indicator and statistics show we are getting on top of this, we need to be cautious because there could be other factors involved,” says Tinline.

Shah, himself a victim of burn-out in his 20s, believes presenteeism poses even bigger challenges than absence. “If people operate below their potential and deliver less than their usual capacity, there are serious financial implications,” he says. “We’re living in an economic climate where organisations need to achieve more through less people so we have to support people better. Managing stress is not just about a happier, healthier workforce – it’s about the ability to survive in difficult economic conditions.”

Like stress itself, there are no easy answers to its management. There will always be a number of variables, not least that some people are naturally more able to cope with pressure than others, so identifying those most at risk is a challenge. What looks certain is that managers will play an increasingly important part in helping organisations deal with the problem.

Tinline says that while most organisations know the worst thing they could do is pull the plug on wellbeing programmes, there is a squeeze on budgets. The advantage of embedding wellbeing schemes into core management practices, therefore, makes a lot of economic sense. “It’s not something that has to be funded like an intervention; it just costs a bit of the manager’s time,” he says. “After all, what is a manager’s job? It’s not just to do lots of tasks but to get the best out of people. If training for stress management became part of more development courses, we’d begin to see it become part of core people management.”