Balancing the Positives and Negatives of Stress at Work

a post by Brendan Street (Professional Head of Emotional Well-being, Nuffield Health) for ByteStart: the small business portal

Stress is an inevitable part of everyday life and our bodies are hard-wired to respond to it. However, it’s clear stress is taking a negative toll on businesses across the country.

Poor mental health costs employers between £1,205 and £1,560 per employee every year. This cost is for all employees, not just those who are ill, so we asked Brendan Street of Nuffield Health to show how employers can cut the cost of stress.

Last year, stress, depression or anxiety accounted for 44 percent of all work-related ill health cases and 57 percent of all working days lost due to ill health. 15.4 million days were lost due to work related stress in 2017/2018.

The main causes of stress in the workplace are workload pressures, mounting responsibility and a perceived lack of support from senior management.

Let’s start by exploring the difference between helpful and unhelpful stress and what this means for employers looking to improve the well-being of their workforce.

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Hazel’s comment:
I tend to skate over ByteStart’s blog posts because I no longer run a small business but every so often I come across a post such as this which may be applicable to a much wider audience.

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Going thin on top: work intensification and the neglect of personal support of senior managers

an article by David Meacheam (University of New South Wales at The Australian Defence Force Academy, Australia) published in International Journal of Work Innovation Volume 1 Number 1 (2012)

Abstract

As organisations from the early 1990s flattened, senior managers have to a large degree been asked to cope with much less by way of personal support for the execution of their duties. Personal assistants are increasingly rare, senior managers are commonly expected to perform quite menial tasks (typing and filing) that have little overall impact on their work effectiveness, and the private lives of these senior managers becomes impoverished as a result.

A series of organisational failures arising from this refusal by many organisations (government, private sector and church-based) are critically assessed. The moral implications of the failure by many organisations to support senior managers are examined, and an effort is made to generate a debate in support of this often well paid, but poorly supported part of the modern workforce.

Full text (PDF 6pp)

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