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Working together to relieve stress and strain

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Mandy Geal & Professor Patricia Riddell

Stress is a complex problem and the responsibility for mitigating its worst impact is not always clear.

Individuals are advised to reduce personal stress through activities such as meditation and taking a holiday but return to the same stressful organisational problems that they can’t fix. Front line managers are the most likely to be responsible for noticing stress in others and connecting individuals with remedies but are often so stressed themselves they don’t have the bandwidth. Organisations invest in providing resources to help employees, but people are often reluctant to use them, or they aren’t tailored for the situation or the person.

Part of the problem is that the term ‘stress’ is too general and doesn’t differentiate between the things that stress you, how you personally respond to stress, and what you need to remedy it. All these elements need to be considered to combat the potential decline in mental health and wellbeing, which results from too much stress.

A new definition

Patricia Riddell, professor of Applied Neuroscience at Reading University and lecturer at Henley Business School, explains: “A better understanding of the neuroscience of stress can help us to deal with it more appropriately. Stress is an everyday reality for almost every employee and to varying degrees we all need stress to function effectively. In engineering terms, stress is the load transmitted onto materials and strain is the measure of the resulting distortion, which can become permanent. It’s the same for people.

“People have an effective mechanism for responding to and recovering from stress using a complex interplay of stress hormones, which bring them back to a resting state after a short stressful period. The diagram here shows three ‘zones’ where performance is impacted differently by stress and can help us choose when and how to act.”

In Zone 1, some stress is healthy. For example, working together with trusted colleagues to meet a short-term challenge feels rewarding and is ‘good’ stress.

In Zone 2, stress starts to become problematic, but the individual has time and remedies for recovering from the strain. For example, meeting a rushed deadline by working longer hours and losing sleep, but having time off afterwards to switch off and recuperate, means the stress and the resulting strain both stop.

In Zone 3, continual stressors, for example working with insufficient time/resources to cover workload with no time to recover and no chance of improving the situation, mean stress becomes chronic. The raised level of stress hormones circulating continuously in the bloodstream turns healthy stress into toxic strain, e.g. high blood pressure and heart attack.

“Strain is detrimental to the physical and mental health of the employee and the operational and economic performance of a business and reputation as an employer,” says Professor Riddell.

But why don’t people recognise and/or admit to experiencing stress and strain?

“People suffer in silence because they fear that by voicing their concerns, they will harm their current and future job prospects or be perceived as weak or ineffective,” Professor Riddell says.

“It’s difficult for people to recognise they are in Zone 3 (chronic stress) so they may be unaware they need support. Stress affects the quality of work and the resulting performance of people, leading to more strain.”

A shared responsibility

For the most effective solutions, responsibility for tackling stress and strain needs to be shared.

Organisations have a huge impact on sources of stress for their employees through their working environment and culture. For example, some actions taken by employers to build organisational resilience (e.g. frequent reorganisations) can inadvertently generate more stress for their employees.

Unclear responsibilities and goals; changing priorities; too much or too little communication; constant change; blame; and lack of constructive feedback create uncertainty, novelty, and lack of control, which are stressors for most people.
No ethical employer wants to be the cause of poor physical and mental health in their employees; therefore, these problems must be addressed by employers. The ethical and financial benefits are that monitoring, measuring, and pro-actively reducing strain leads to increased productivity and efficiency. (‘Investing in People’, RailStaff 292, Jul/Aug 2024).

Individuals find different things stressful. How much strain they experience depends upon their perceived ability to cope and their personal window of tolerance, i.e. how much stress that person can cope with, which is also affected by factors outside work. Individuals can take action to improve their response to stressful conditions and the remedies they use to recover. They can engage with organisational changes to mitigate stressful conditions.

Diagnostics and solutions

So, what can be done?

“The first step is to quantify the scale of the problem and to isolate what is causing strain in an organisation,” says Professor Riddell. “One challenge facing employers, however, is that what Employee A may regard as toxic strain, Employee B regards as perfectly normal, healthy stress. It’s really important to emphasise that you cannot judge someone else’s response to a stressor by how you would respond yourself.

“Simply asking people the straight question ‘Are you stressed at work?’ often doesn’t get a straight or accurate answer. Asking employees to differentiate between stress and strain without any sort of credible yardstick is largely meaningless. Hence there is a need for a robust psychological test that delivers a numerical output. In this way, people can quantify the level of stress and strain they are under in a consistent and meaningful way and take appropriate action.”

Professor Riddell identified 12 causes of strain in organisations from neuroscience and psychology research. For example, a lack of autonomy, perception of ‘unfairness’, role conflict, overwhelm, or lack of personal development. Learning Partners and Professor Riddell created a questionnaire for individuals to find out which of these causes, if any, they are experiencing, and designed resources to address the causes. These resources are videos, notes, techniques, advice, training, and coaching, which individuals can access online or face-to-face. Learning Partners provides a focused and insightful analysis of overall anonymised results to highlight actions for employers to take to prevent stress and reduce strain.

In conclusion, to become a successful and resilient organisation with effective and resilient employees, it takes the shared responsibility of employers and employees to identify and address causes of strain.

Image credit: iStockphoto.com/CreativeDesignArt

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