How stress affects business

The stress that an employee encounters at the workplace adversely affects the productivity of an organisation. Are you doing anything to curb it?

The negative impact of employee stress on business is now an acknowledged factor. Studies in America have proved that the annual cost of employee stress in terms of loss to productivity is more than $300 billion. Unmanaged stress has a debilitating impact on the organisation, and the consequences vary from loss of individual productivity to increased absenteeism to rise in employee attrition. Team morale and company productivity are also adversely affected. But is it possible to create a stress-free workplace? Probably not, as it is indeed an integral part of our personal and professional lives, but the solution lies in creating an environment that reduces its impact.

"A healthy dose of stress gets us into action. The challenge is the debilitating doses of stress that are more destructive than constructive" - Seth Appel Director Talent Transformation Group OfficeTiger

The fact that employee stress is a subjective matter cannot be overlooked. What might appear as a stressful situation for one might be taken as a normal work routine by another.

Unmanaged stress

Stressful working conditions have a direct negative impact on the mental and physical well-being of the workforce. A disgruntled workforce obviously under-performs and under-delivers, leading to an impact on the bottom-line. “In a precautionary sense, unmanaged stress can be infectious in large-sized organisations. As a nation, we have spent the last two decades trying to eradicate cohesion of employees in a formal context (unions, associations) from the workplace. Unfortunately, such a scenario is fuelled by intangible conditions like unmanaged stress. In addition, a company can suffer external image damage from being perceived as having a stressful work environment, limiting its talent acquisition strategies,” says Monisha Advani, CEO, Emmay HR.

Stress undermines an employee’s ability to think clearly, to work well with others, and to perform his or her best. Seth Appel, Director, Talent Transformation Group, OfficeTiger, lists the obvious consequences: poor decision-making, absenteeism, burn-out, attrition, and unnecessary and wasteful inter-personal conflict.

Business cost

The need to calculate the business cost of employee stress has led to many studies being conducted globally. Eileen Sweeney, Senior Vice-President, Global HR, Lionbridge Technologies lists the key indicators of stress:

• Absenteeism
• Rising health costs
• Attrition
• Lowered productivity and increased production costs.
  
  

  The way Lionbridge tackles it

  Eileen Sweeney Lionbridge Technologies has introduced several initiatives, the most significant being the Counselling Desk, where an in-house counsellor addresses employees on their career needs, problems in adjustment, and guidance without prejudice. “This is an innovative way to curb emotional stress at the workplace, and also provides us with a further strengthening of a ‘high touch’ work environment. While we have provided some guidance to employees informally in the past, we now realise that such services are the things that make a difference, and therefore decided to address them formally,” says Eileen Sweeney, Senior Vice-president, Global HR, Lionbridge Technologies. In addition, the company has organised a series of programmes to address aspects of this issue. Sweeney informs that these are open programmes for all Lionbridge employees. “One of the objectives of the ‘WeCare’ programme is to help employees strike a balance between the most central realms of life i.e. work and family. Achieving a balance in life is a challenge for busy people. As we get busier, our priorities get muddled, and we spend less time nourishing our inner selves. The objective of these programmes is to balance work and home, prioritise, deal effectively with time issues, and learn mind/body relaxation techniques.” As part of the HR and employee welfare plans, the company has introduced programmes pertaining to eye care and eye health, healthy mind and healthy body, through Nirvana, spiritual quotient, family life, career and social life.

"It is possible to create an ambience which infuses a healthy, positive energy in the workplace and puts everyone in a ‘can-do’ mood" - Madan Padaki Co-founder & Director Business Development MeriTrac Services

Appel opines that one way to measure the cost of stress is to make a measured judgement based on employee exit interviews and on the percentage of attrition due to stress. “When the cost to recruit, train and develop a new employee is accounted for, we can arrive at a general cost that the company is incurring due to stress. Unfortunately, it is difficult to measure the other less-tangible by-products of stress—managers who engage in needless bickering instead of working together, and employees who return home and spend their free time worrying about work and return the following day tired instead of energised. Don’t forget the team members who are too anxious to speak openly at meetings, and therefore deprive the company of their good ideas. All of these are unwanted and wasteful by-products of stress that are hard to quantify.”

Stress can also be measured in terms of productivity gains or losses, and the consequent revenues. “A correlation can be seen in stressful roles, specially in the IT and BPO sectors wherein typical measurements like lines of code per day, average call-handling time, number of calls taken and so on have a direct bearing on the stress levels of employees,” says Madan Padaki, Co-founder and Director, Business Development, MeriTrac Services.

‘Preventing’ stress

It is believed that one should work at preventing stress rather than at managing it. Interestingly, most experts seem divided over the issue.

Aiming to ‘prevent employee stress’ is not a realistic goal, asserts Appel, adding that it is not even a desired goal. He then explains why. “Modern psychology often makes the mistake of trying to create a stress- and worry-free world. This is a misguided aim as stress and worry play important functions in our day-to-day lives. Worry is a way our brain forces us to focus on important problems. A healthy dose of stress gets us out of our chairs and into action. The challenge is not stress, but the debilitating doses of stress that are destructive rather than constructive. A little bit of stress can be a good thing.”

The pressures to perform at peak levels consistently is a set expectation from every employee, and as a result stress cannot be avoided. Padaki however believes that the need of the hour is to help employees manage stress effectively, and more importantly, create a corporate ambience that does not perpetrate any other internal strain in the organisation. “It is possible to create such an ambience which infuses a healthy, positive energy in the workplace and puts everyone in a ‘can-do’ mood.”

A preventive approach is indeed needed, particularly since formal remedial policies to manage stress can lead to an acknowledgement on the part of an employer that a problem exists.

Insisting that prevention is better than cure, Sweeney points out that companies need to consistently focus on taking measures to reduce stress. One key aspect of stress reduction is ensuring that employees and managers are provided with the skills and tools needed to perform their roles successfully.

Complete freedom from stress can never be a reality, whether in personal or professional life.

“Perhaps a priest in a temple can aim for a stress-free workplace, but in the business sector stress is part of the day’s work. An essential part of business involves destroying current systems, connections, understandings, products and so on, and re-creating them into something new. By definition, there is going to be some stress in this process. Again, as a manager pushes a team to better its performance, incorporate new technology and bring up innovative ideas, this process will inevitably cause stress. The goal is to find ways to manage this stress in a positive and constructive manner,” concludes Appel.