Stopping the Drainning
Summer always brings the promise of recovery, reenergising and the forging of a renewed personal capacity. That promise seems harder and harder to fulfil when chronic stress still remains prevalent in our organisations. What are we missing entirely?
In our conversations with our clients, summer holiday period is the most stressful period of the year. And so, the effect of rest is completely undermined by poor preparation and lack of work re-design to keep up organisational operational capacity with a reduced workforce capacity during that period.
Despite all the research and organisational learning we have done, why are we compelled to make the same mistakes in our work experiences? Are we unable to learn different ways to work (or design work), or different ways to manage? How come we haven’t lifted the heavy weights yet?
Simply put, because we are humans, and we tend to change only if we are forced to. And the force must be completely and unrelentlessly powerful, sometimes, in order for us to do so.
It is much easier to bend to what shows up as something to add when it comes to address stress at work. We have more activities, more benefits, more talks… but if the answer is perhaps to start taking out or at least reconsider not adding more. To do this we need to understand how to tackle root causes of stress at work, admit that perhaps we need to change our work practices and processes, and to not feel threatened by this fact, but empowered.
Stress is a normal process of adaptation, when we continuously build better systems and approaches to deal with it. If we think that handling stress is anchored only at the individual level capacity we miss entirely the opportunity to transform our organisation and enable it to adapt and regenerate itself. Distress can actually destroy an organisation.
If we perceive distress at work as a symptom of poor organisational performance we are on our way to harvest huge savings. We no longer stigmatise people manifesting high stress at work, since we immediately consider as a rule of thumb that their working conditions are not ideal or sustainable, and these conditions are designed by the organisation.
It seems easy, but this is our biggest challenge. No kidding.
In this edition of our review we invite you to revisit the hidden costs of distress in organisations in our blog post. We also suggest an interesting book by Ana Maria Rossi, James A Meurs and Pamela L Perrewé “Stress and Quality of Working Life: Conceptualizing and Assessing Stress”. And finally invite you to listen to a TED Talk by Rob Cooke about “The cost of workplace stress — and how to reduce it”.
I would like to end by wishing you a restful and inspiring holiday period and that by September new ideas to re-design work and your organisation will kick-start and enable you and your team to handle stress in a positive and resilient way.
Do take part in this conversation by leaving a comment on our blog or replying to hello@bound.health
Managing Partner Bound.Health
