Passages

 Stress of Workplace

A.

How busy is too busy? For some it means having to miss the occasional long lunch; for

others it means missing lunch altogether. For a few, it is not being able to take a

“sickie” once a month. Then there is a group of people for whom working every evening

and weekend is normal, and frantic is the tempo of their lives. For most senior

executives, workloads swing between extremely busy and frenzied. The vice-president

of the management consultancy AT Kearney and its head of telecommunications for

the Asia-Pacific region, Neil Plumridge, says his work weeks vary from a “manageable”

45 hours to 80 hours, but average 60 hours

B.

Three warning signs alert Plumridge about his workload: sleep, scheduling and family.

He knows he has too much on when he gets less than six hours of sleep for three

consecutive nights; when he is constantly having to reschedule appointments; “and the

third one is on the family side”, says Plumridge, the father of a three-year-old daughter,

and expecting a second child in October. “If I happen to miss a birthday or anniversary,

I know things are out of control.” Being “too busy” is highly subjective. But for any

individual, the perception of being too busy over a prolonged period can start showing

up as stress: disturbed sleep, and declining mental and physical health. National

workers’ compensation figures show stress causes the most lost time of any workplace

injury. Employees suffering stress are off work an average of 16.6 weeks. The effects

of stress are also expensive. Comcare, the Federal Government insurer, reports that in

2003-04, claims for psychological injury accounted for 7% of claims but almost 27% of

claim costs. Experts say the key to dealing with stress is not to focus on relief – a game

of golf or a massage – but to reassess workloads. Neil Plumridge says he makes it a

priority to work out what has to change; that might mean allocating extra resources to a

job, allowing more time or changing expectations. The decision may take several days.

He also relies on the advice of colleagues, saying his peers’ coach each other with

business problems. “Just a fresh pair of eyes over an issue can help,” he says.

C.

Executive stress is not confined to big organisations. Vanessa Stoykov has been

running her own advertising and public relations business for seven years, specialising

in work for financial and professional services firms. Evolution Media has grown so fast

that it debuted on the BRW Fast 100 list of fastest-growing small enterprises last year –

just after Stoykov had her first child. Stoykov thrives on the mental stimulation of

running her own business. “Like everyone, I have the occasional day when I think my

head’s going to blow off,” she says. Because of the growth phase the business is in,

Stoykov has to concentrate on short-term stress relief – weekends in the mountains,

the occasional “mental health” day – rather than delegating more work. She says:

“We’re hiring more people, but you need to train them, teach them about the culture

and the clients, so it’s actually more work rather than less.”

D.

Identify the causes: Jan Elsnera, Melbourne psychologist who specialises in executive

coaching, says thriving on a demanding workload is typical of senior executives and

other high-potential business people. She says there is no one-size-fits-all approach to

stress: some people work best with high-adrenalin periods followed by quieter patches,

while others thrive under sustained pressure. “We could take urine and blood hormonal

measures and pass a judgment of whether someone’s physiologically stressed or not,”

she says. “But that’s not going to give us an indicator of what their experience of stress

is, and what the emotional and cognitive impacts of stress are going to be.”

E.

Eisner’s practice is informed by a movement known as positive psychology, a school of

thought that argues “positive” experiences – feeling engaged, challenged, and that one

is making a contribution to something meaningful – do not balance out negative ones

such as stress; instead, they help people increase their resilience over time. Good

stress, or positive experiences of being challenged and rewarded, is thus cumulative in

the same way as bad stress. Elsner says many of the senior business people she

coaches are relying more on regulating bad stress through methods such as meditation

and yoga. She points to research showing that meditation can alter the biochemistry of

the brain and actually help people “retrain” the way their brains and bodies react to

stress. “Meditation and yoga enable you to shift the way that your brain reacts, so if you

get proficient at it you’re in control.”

F.

The Australian vice-president of AT Kearney, Neil Plumridge, says: “Often stress is

caused by our setting unrealistic expectations of ourselves. I’ll promise a client I’ll do

something tomorrow, and then promise another client the same thing, when I really

know it’s not going to happen. I’ve put stress on myself when I could have said to the

clients: ‘Why don’t I give that to you in 48 hours?’ The client doesn’t care.” Over-

committing is something people experience as an individual problem. We explain it as

the result of procrastination or Parkinson’s law: that work expands to fill the time

available. New research indicates that people may be hard-wired to do it.

G.

A study in the February issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology shows that

people always believe they will be less busy in the future than now. This is a

misapprehension, according to the authors of the report, Professor Gal Zauberman, of

the University of North Carolina, and Professor John Lynch, of Duke University. “On

average, an individual will be just as busy two weeks or a month from now as he or she

is today. But that is not how it appears to be in everyday life,” they wrote. “People often

make commitments long in advance that they would never make if the same

commitments required immediate action. That is, they discount future time investments

relatively steeply.” Why do we perceive a greater “surplus” of time in the future than inthe present? The researchers suggest that people underestimate completion times for

tasks stretching into the future, and that they are bad at imagining future competition for

their time.