Stress Factors
The Access HR Team | 1 Sep 2008 1:05 PM
Stress claims under workers compensation and common law are increasing. WorkCover Victoria, for example, reports an increase of more than 200 per cent since 1996.
Some commentators say modern work life and social pressures have created a far more stressful environment than ever before. Others note that a stress claim can be a cheap and effective way of pursuing a complaint against an employer, particularly where other avenues, such as unfair termination or internal grievance mechanisms, are unavailable or far less lucrative.
Employers clearly need to be more vigilant than ever before. Management behavior and its systems and practices are under attack, and the battleground is not necessarily within the traditional confines of the industrial relations tribunal. Psychologists, psychiatrists and medical practitioners are all becoming involved in pinpointing the work stressors that employees rely on as the basis for their claims.
Workplace stress can be broken down into three components:
· Physical and environmental stressors – such as work demands, internal relationships and conflict on the job
· Physiological and psychological responses – the reaction to the stressors, which may be physical, such as increased blood pressure and heart rate, or physiological effects such as increased anxiety, depression and aggression.
· Worker perception and processing of the physical and environmental stressors.
The evaluation of these three aspects of workplace stress, together with an interrogation of whether an employer has been acting reasonably in its dealing with its workers, form the backdrop to the Work Choices industrial relations issues currently being played out.
A starting point for any examination of workplace stress is the physical and environmental influences, commonly referred to as ‘workplace stressors’. Consider the scenario where a change in role may give rise to a stress claim.
Case Study
“I’ve never been told that before.”
Vijay has been a sales executive for a printing company for 25 years. After a larger company took over, rumors have been rife about staff redundancies and massive changes to the business.
For some time, a new state sales manager has been reinforcing that Vijay needs to take the new company philosophy on board. Vijay has been seeking a better understanding of what that is, but it’s still unclear. He feels under a lot of pressure because the company philosophy, such as it is, could be used as the vehicle to performance – manage him out of the organization.
Many employees who identify with this category of case would argue that they simply don’t understand what is being expected of them, particularly in regard to less tangible issues such as motivation, teamwork and communication among peers.
In 1990, the inaugural Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey identified relationship and communication breakdowns at work as a major contributor to industrial disputes. Relationship breakdowns may be between co-workers and relate mainly to personality conflicts, or perhaps competition for better paid jobs. Then there are the relationship issues that arise from supervisory and reporting roles in an organization. It is here, by far, that the greatest number of problems occurs, and it is here that the modern concept of workplace bullying has been established.
Best Practice
Best practice suggests that everyone in a workplace should have some responsibility for monitoring stressors and the stressed.
Managerial accountability must include responsibility for precautionary measures to remove or minimize exposure to risks, and responsibility for the fall-out when something goes wrong. Managers must have a good understanding of the issues, the problems, and the potential for stress to become a serious and costly issue.
Managers must ensure they have a broad range of people management skills for detecting psychological hazards.
Workers are responsible for maintaining a check on their own physical and psychological warning indicators, blood pressure, levels of anger, etc.
One of the problems with employee management generally is that it often functions in a cyclical, responsive way. Management textbooks are replete with examples of how performance reviews should take place annually, at which time key performance targets and role negotiations are determined for another year.
But management is a daily issue; the needs of personnel should be monitored and maintained on a daily basis. Supervisors need to ask employees “How are you?” and mean it, not because they necessarily like them as people, but because issues may need resolving before they escalate.
Workplace stress can be spotted in social behaviors such as taking an increasing number of “smoko” or work breaks. This may be a coping mechanism to deal with increased anxiety or annoyance. Increased patterns of drinking and workplace absenteeism are other indicators.
People management and performance reviews should go beyond the mere meeting of numeric targets. People issues require a level of communication and empathy that respects and interprets employee’s concerns in a genuinely supportive way.
Source: Andrew See is a Brisbane barrister and employment law specialist. HR Monthly June 2006