Stress in the workplace
Sep
Having only recently changed jobs, it occurred to me that now would be an ideal time to post about a topic that’s been on my mind for a long time – stress in the workplace.
After 10 years of working in the web-industry, I’ve come to realise that a lot of factors can contribute to stress levels. From personal experience, I’ve worked the 80 – 120 hours a week to get projects live, sat in offices that are almost arctic (once in a datacentre where the manager would turn the air con to polar settings, and once for a company that worked in a warehouse with no real heating), and have even experienced stress being caused by not having enough work to do (boredom can be a surprising stress inducer).
I thought long and hard about how I could distill the above down to a concise point… Thankfully, it turns out I didn’t have to. About 3 months ago, during a conversation with Paul Lomax about the stresses and strains of daily life, he came out with a line that struck a perfect chord.
“Stress for me is caused by the inability for one to change their environment.”
I’m paraphrasing the above by the way. My poor stress addled brain wasn’t up to much on that day (hence the conversation), but you get the gist. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. If I was cold, I’d turn the heating on – problem solved. Of course, if I couldn’t, then my concerns about one day being excavated out of a block of ice would have added to my daily stress.
The theory works well in almost any situation. Today for instance, I spent hours trying to get a DNS change sorted – something that I once would have done myself in minutes, now has to be handled by another part of the company, emails sent, red tape ploughed through, taking time, effort and having a knock on effect to my working day. By lunchtime, I was ready to stab someone with a fork.
Stress affects us all in different ways – I’ve seen numerous people (including myself) have stress manifest itself in rashes, IBS, heart palpitations, all the way through to full blown rage attacks and nervous breakdowns. It’s not a pretty sight – and is a situation that could so easily be prevented.
Empower your staff to change the environment they work in – whether it be something little like decorating the office so they feel comfortable, or something major, like letting them have a say in how the business is run. After all, few people actively want to make life harder for themselves – you may find that the recommendation someone makes about how to make their life easier makes your life easier too – it might even make you more profitable.
In the course of writing this post, I was interrupted a stack of times by the ringing of my phone, and numerous times by people asking me “a quick question”. Tomorrow, I’ll be turning off my phone for lunch, and enjoying the park, weather permitting.
