Work Stress

I read a fascinating book just before Christmas called The Stress Test, which was written by clinical psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist Professor Ian Robertson. The book explains his findings and theories about stress, it’s causes, and the impact stress can have on a person’s life. It tries to understand how for some people stress can make them crumble, whereas for others stress can make them more resilient. It got me thinking about how stress is often associated with communication or relationship challenges.

Stress occurs when a person feels that the demands made on them exceed their ability to cope. Stress can come from any area of life - whether it be financial pressures, family relationships, sickness, mental health problems or big life changes. For many people their biggest stress is work-related – in fact, you would be hard-pushed to find a person who didn’t know someone who had taken time off work with stress. According to the Labour Force Survey 2015/16 half a million workers in the UK suffer with work-related stress, anxiety or depression and it is estimated that 11.7 million days were lost due to stress-related absences.

Stress is a huge issue – both for those suffering with it and for organisations trying to understand the causes and how to make positive changes to improve the situation. Stress can impact on a person’s mood, sleep, and relationships. It can affect a person’s ability to function, such as being unable to make decisions or to concentrate. It can also manifest as physical symptoms such as headaches, eye tension, chest pain, or stomach problems.

In ‘The Stress Test’ Professor Ian Robertson explains the physical response to stress where your brain releases adrenaline and cortisol – which is commonly referred to as the ‘fight or flight’ response. This produces a heightened awareness of what’s going on around you and can cause someone to feel overwhelmed. For many people who suffer with stress, it can also lead to anxiety or depression.

Whether the cause of the stress is work-related or from outside factors, stress is likely to impact on a person’s performance at work. It is well-documented that stress can have a negative impact on productivity, it can lead to poor decision-making and mistakes being made. It could also cause sickness absence, a higher staff turnover and poor workplace relations. Thus, there is a also a business case for tackling stress in the workplace .

To tackle such a wide-reaching issue, there needs to be a 2-pronged approach: self-management and organisational awareness.

Self-management :
Ideally, we would all be aware of how we are feeling, why we feel that way and how to make ourselves feel better instantly. Realistically, we are very complicated beings and may not always understand how we are being affected by circumstance or what triggers certain feelings. One theory that I took from Professor Ian Robertson is that to become resilient against stress, you need 3 key ingredients:
1. Self-awareness – the ability to understand why you are feeling the way you do about a situation, yourself, or another person and to be able to regulate those feelings. It means understanding what triggers you to feel happy, angry or overwhelmed and if your response is caused just by the circumstances you are in, by external factors or by something that happened in your history.
2. Distance from situation – the ability to look objectively at a situation, so that the heightened awareness caused by stress doesn’t cause a person to feel an emotion or respond in a way that’s disproportionate to the event.
3. Belief of control – knowing that you can have some control over the situation. Some things are out of our control, but we can choose how we respond.

Organisational awareness :
It was highlighted in the Labour Force Survey 2015/16 that the main causes of work-related stress fit into two categories:
1. Workload pressure
a. Too much responsibility
b. Too much pressure
c. Tight deadlines
2. Lack of managerial support
a. Organisational changes
b. Violence at work
c. Role uncertainty

The above sub-categories are largely self-explanatory; yet there is a consistent theme in that they all involve a lack of control to change the situation and a feeling of not being supported in their role. From a mediator’s perspective it seems that having open communication between employees and employers would greatly reduce the above stressors. This includes ensuring that staff feel heard when they have concerns, enabling staff to have input in changes being made and trying to nip any miscommunication in the bud.

Just as those 3 key ingredients from Professor Ian Robertson are required for individuals to withstand stress, for organisations to deal with stress-related issues in their workplace they also need to:
• Be self-aware in order to see what they are doing well at and what needs improvement to reduce the causes of stress on their workers
• Be able to distance themselves from the situation enough to objectively determine whether the workload being put on people, the environment they work in and any changes being made are realistic and reasonable; or alternatively, whether the response from staff is disproportionate to those factors
• To believe in their ability to have some control over stress-related issues

Stress is a sensitive topic and it can manifest itself in many ways. It can lead to problems with work relationships - between colleagues, within management, and between staff and line managers. On the face of it, a breakdown in relationship or conflict may appear to have no relation to stress; however, it would be helpful for both parties to take any potential stress-related issues into consideration as a possible cause of problems when having difficulties working with, or communicating effectively with, someone at work.

ACAS has provided a simple table on the causes of work-related stress and some ideas for an organisation to tackle the issue here, http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=815.

As a neutral third party, a mediator has the ability to act as a sounding-board for each person involved in the dispute. Through talking and reality-checking, a mediator is often able to get to the source of the concerns and can then facilitate a more productive and positive conversation.

If you know of a situation in your organisation that might benefit from mediation, or are interested in finding out more, please get in contact by emailing emma.jenkings@mosaicmediation.co.uk or get in touch via the Contact page .