Work Place Stress

Americans are stressed - and work is a big factor. In an article by Kelly Holland in the March 23rd edition of the New York Times entitled "The Tension Builds (It’s Almost Monday)" it is noted that in "Poll results released last October by the American Psychological Association", "one-third of Americans are living with extreme stress, and that the most commonly cited source of stress — mentioned by 74 percent of respondents — was work. That was up from 59 percent the previous year."

In addition "More than half the respondents to the survey said they had left a job or considered doing so because of stress, and 55 percent said that stress made them less productive at work." and "some 48 percent of the employers in the survey said stress created by long hours and limited resources was affecting business performance, but only 5 percent said they were taking strong action to address those areas.

What does this say about leadership? We are knowingly allowing stress to impact our organizations - through loss of productivity and loss of people but are not taking "strong action" to fix the problem! I suspect that many companies are taking NO action.

Several other blogs have picked up on the article and the results. In Wally Bock's Three Star Leadership Blog posting "Sunday Afternoons" Mr. Bock notes "If you want to head off the "chronic sadness of late Sunday afternoon," the best way to do that is to give people a great working environment to go to on Monday morning. And the key to that is great supervisors. Select them. Train them. Support them." That's each of us - anyone who is called "the boss" - company leadership.

There are two good examples of companies that have done something about stress - GlaxoSmithKline and PWC. The PWC example I find particularly relevant to I.T. and Technology Organizations. PWC focused on eliminating the interruptions on weekends. I.T. Organizations work weekends - either because of changes that have to be implemented during off hours or project deadlines that won't be met without extra hours or outages. But that doesn't mean that we should expect other work to be accomplished during those times. Giving people the downtime that they deserve, that they need, improves our organization's efficiency, decreases turnover, increases satisfaction.

Finally, in Spherion's blog post "Life in the Cubicle - Burning the Midnight Oil" (from which the graphic in this post was swiped THANK YOU Spherion)they note that "nearly one third of U.S. workers spend between 41 and 50 hours a week at the office, and another 12% clock 50 hours or more weekly.". While we all know that it is often necessary in I.T. to work long hours - it should not constant and leadership has to make sure that we do what is necessary to reduce the requirement for long hours with no break. We also have to make sure that long hours at work are rewarded - not considered normal and expected. A bit of appreciation.

My thanks to the New York Times - many great articles that make me think about leadership, and technology.