Technology is also exacerbating stress levels. Once an employee finished work and switched off.”We didn’t realise it at the time, but we were giving ourselves a natural respite in our days,” Clements says. “Now people are coming home and still connecting. They might not be actioning things; but even seeing a work message can trigger the fight-or-flight response. Generally the pace of work is faster because of technology.” Workplace social support is also weakening. “People are busier; we all rely on technology – we even email the person sitting next to us – rather than having face-to-face conversations with people,” Clements says.
However, many organisations and some supervisors and team leaders “may not fully appreciate how big an issue (stress) is for some of their employees”, Groth believes.”(Staff) need to hold everything in because if they show any sign of weakness it’s not going to look good and they may be penalised,” he says. “So they’re not going to necessarily know how stressed people are.”
The most effective way to manage stress is at the organisational level: overloaded staff can be given more resources and time. But Clements says the resources in many workplaces are shrinking.”Often those organisational resources can’t be changed; they seem to be getting tighter and tighter,” she says. Many managers are being forced to turn to boosting the coping abilities of their stressed-out staff through resilience training, which helps staff change and manage their emotional reactions and learn more adaptive ways to cope with demands and pressures.
“There has been a huge increase in requests for emotional resilience training in the last 18 months,” Clements says. “Managers are realising they cannot necessarily do anything about organisational resources and objectives, and we’re in a tough market. But individual managers are realising they want their team to last the distance and they need to be helping.”
Clements says managers are in a difficult situation. “They can see the organisation’s objectives and might not necessarily agree with those, but can’t do anything about them, but they also see staff struggling under those pressures. They’re wanting to do something for their staff.”
Resilience training can be effective. Clements says humans are like cars: when run down they are often out of fuel or energy. There are a number of ways to refuel, including exercise; spending time with colleagues, friends and family, even if it’s talking to a friend over the phone; and making some time outside of work for interests and hobbies. Maintaining physical wellbeing also boosts resilience. Drinking water, limiting coffee and alcohol, eating well, getting enough sleep and rest, and doing yoga, breathing or meditation may be helpful.
“Learning techniques to improve the quality of one’s thinking and reactions to pressures and demands is another key to boosting resilience, as well as mindfulness training which allows us to be in the present more often,” Clements adds.”It doesn’t really matter what the activity is, as long as you’re doing something for 20 minutes a day to top yourself up. The challenge is making the time to do something different and incorporate it into your lifestyle to improve personal resilience.”
But Caponecchia considers the trend of relying on emotional resilience training concerning. “These are things for which we’re not supposed to take an individual focus. It’s not meant to be about blaming the individual.” He says stress is a psychological hazard that’s meant to be managed like other workplace hazards as an occupational health and safety issue. “For any other hazard you would never make the individual the sole focus of attention,” he says. “If I was a construction worker and I was pulling down a building that was full of asbestos, you wouldn’t tell me to be very careful not to breathe in asbestos particles, would you?”
Caponecchia says that emotional resilience training is “okay” if used with other strategies. “I’ve seen some organisations put people into resilience programs when they knew they were going to go through change. They sent them all off to resilience training beforehand to buffer against this change. It’s a bad intervention when used by itself; there are much more effective strategies they could be using in addition, such as consultation.”
Clements agrees that if organisations are serious about building emotional resilience and assisting their staff to maintain effective work performance with positive wellbeing, then it should be a “two-level approach”. “That includes providing staff with personal resilience tools and strategies, but also developing organisational strategies and having constructive cultures to assist people to flourish even in the face of demands and pressures.”
The alternative way of managing workplace stress is changing tasks and restructuring organisations and thinking about job design. But “it’s not an easy thing to do”, Caponecchia indicates.
One of the major stressors at work, for example, is role conflict. “There is role conflict in one job where you’re being pulled apart in opposite directions: as part of the role you have to do one thing, but also have to do the opposite,” Caponecchia says. A call centre worker might be repeatedly told their organisation wants them to give absolutely stellar customer service; it’s all about customer service. But at the same time it might pressure operators not to spend long on the phone.
“That stuff can seem hard to solve,” Caponecchia says. “But there are ways to solve it – it’s about job redesign.” The call centre, for example, could have some people who deal with difficult cases who need more time, and others to deal with more regular, easy to solve issues.”
Caponecchia says stress management needs to be an organisation-wide strategy, rather than just frontline people trying to fix it, and it needs to be driven from the top. “Ideally it’s the chief executive,” he says. “They need to be aware of this. Smart CEOs know stress affects their bottom line. They know that if you get the tasks and work conditions right then productivity goes up.”
But frontline managers are not always supported at the organisational level, or given more resources. So what should they do?
Groth, who has studied how service employees deal with the emotional pressures of their jobs, says it’s important to create a climate where people can openly address stress issues as they arise. Another key is to select the right people for the job: some people are more prone to get stressed out. Another strategy is training: service staff, for example, can be given empathy training where they learn to put themselves in the shoes of other people and try to see issues from the other person’s point of view.
Rest and breaks are also beneficial. Groth knows of one call centre that had a small breakout room with a punching bag where employees could go to let off steam.”That can be quite helpful; allowing people to take breaks and get offstage and be themselves, vent and relieve their stress,” he says.
Certainly there’s action that frontline managers can take, Caponecchia concedes, but it’s “less effective than changing the tasks”, he insists. “It may be more about supervision and support and providing feedback to people about their tasks. Helping employees to ensure they’re doing their tasks well, and giving them some feedback about it, some recognition; informal kind of stuff – making the context more positive.”
Managers also need to perform “a monitoring function”, keeping an eye on how personal relationships are going and watch to see if someone is getting frustrated and angry, Caponecchia suggests. Ultimately smart organisations should not leave stress management entirely to their frontline managers or their staff. “Those kinds of issues (stress), or other issues of health and safety, need to be dealt with at the same level as other objectives because they affect organisational outputs,” Caponecchia says. Clements agrees that when the culture is one of support, achievement and strong relationships, people can thrive in high-performance environments. “But the moment the culture or leadership changes to a lack of support, people feel overwhelmed and unable to cope.”
