A recent seminar on work-related stress calculated its real cost to both company and employee, writes RONAN McGREEVY
THE WORKPLACE can be a stressful place at the best of times, but this being the worst of times, the problem is even more acute.
The private sector is having to deal with terrible job insecurity and pay cuts; the public sector with a swingeing levy on top of the extra tax that we all have to pay in the coming years.
Attending a seminar on work-related stress organised by the Health and Safety Authority (HSA) last week, the new Minister for Labour Dara Calleary joked that he had a “growing affinity” with the whole concept.
The Minister said the threat of physical injury in the workplace was very real and the effects of stress were less tangible, yet stress could be as costly to both the employees and employers.
“An employee who feels put upon and under strain will be more likely to be absent from work on sick leave and will be less productive when in work. Good stress management is therefore in everyone’s interest,” he said.
Work Positive, an initiative by the HSA, is an attempt to deal with workplace stress in a systematic way.
The HSA has distinguished between pressure, which is necessary in any job to get things done and can act as a motivating force, and stress which is unnecessary and corrosive to the workplace environment.
HSA chief executive Martin O’Halloran said stress had been around as long as human beings had been around. What is new is the approach to dealing with it.
“In the context of the authority, we see it as another hazard in the workplace and we wish to see people engaged and it is mainly around identification and prevention practices. They are much better than rehabilitation afterwards,” he said.
Work Positive is a risk management tool devised by the HSA and Health Scotland. It is predicated on the basis that workplace stress is a risk and, like physical risk, much can be done to avoid it.
Work Positive consists of a questionnaire which is designed to identify potential problems in the workplace under six different headings: demand on workers, control of their working day, support from manager to peer, relationships among employees, the role of employees and how employers and employees manage and react to change.
These have been chosen based on current research findings which suggest that these are potentially the most stressful parts of the working environment.
Patricia Murray, a psychologist with the HSA, said: “The questionnaire rates their environment to do the work they do, the people they work with, the complexity of the tasks, the support they get and how much control they feel. It is not something you do and then put away. You keep redoing it cyclically.”
She cites the example of a notional IT company which employs 120 people. The questionnaire would look at the difference between people who are there in the medium to long term and new arrivals.
“You do a survey and you might find that the new people are very happy, but the people who had been there a long time might not be so happy doing the same work,” she explained.
“We’re looking at relationship strain, demand strain and support strain. They would be the crucial things.”
Anne Buckley, from Mental Health Ireland, said its work with different organisations across the country, particularly the HSE, showed a heightened sense of stress as the recession bites further.
“It is amazing how quickly things change. People are now happy to be at work because work is now more scarce,” she said.
“Employees connect with work better, but I have noticed in recent workshops that there is a lot of fear around people losing their jobs. The lack of resources and the deterioration in the pay packet is all impacting hugely on stress levels in the workplace.”
She said, however, that the most noticeable levels of stress was among the over-50s in the public service who fear they will have to leave because of cutbacks which may see 60,000 losing their jobs in the years ahead.
“There is a real fear of telling people that you are over 50 because there is a perception that when you are 50, they want you to skidaddle.
“Everybody is looking at them wondering why they are still there. This is recognised as a real threat,” she said
Twenty companies have recently taken part in a Work Positive initiative. They included organisations as diverse as Citibank, the ESB, Tallaght Hospital and the National Library of Ireland.
“In hospitals we found the main issue was relationship strain, while in public sector agencies the issue was more about the role of employees in the organisation and whether it was meaningful work,” Murray said.
“What we were looking for was not good or bad employers. It was about whether they have got issues. We told them, ‘why don’t you put these work practices in place and in 12 months time you can reassess it?’”
At a seminar last week, several organisations including the National Library of Ireland and the ESB praised it as a success.
Library HR director Denise Kennedy said they initially thought Work Positive would “open a Pandora’s box” but they found it to be a positive experience.
The library sought to see if there were significant differences between the four layers of staff who work there – librarians, library assistants, clerical and other staff.
They found no significant different levels of stress between the different organisations. Kennedy described it as a “very effective tool and effectively developed”.
The ESB operated Work Positive among 160 employees in its telecoms group. It found, in general, that the ESB was a good organisation to work for, but there needed to be more awareness of potential stress-causing practices.
However, Ronan Collier, the ESB’s health and safety co-ordinator, said Work Practice was only effective for identifying stress factors in the work environment.
“It does not identify those who are screaming inside,” he said.
The Work Positive seminar was addressed by Prof Michael Leiter, from Acadia University in Canada, who is acknowledged as a world expert on work-related stress. He praised the programme.
“It will take groups that really are in a bad way, that are treating each other badly, and will help them get closer to an ordinary way of interacting,” he said. “It will help good groups get even better.”