PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
Coping with stressful work JoOwen, social entrepreneur, founder of Teach First , and author of Resilience – 10 habits to thrive in life andwork , identifies causes and how tomitigate them
A silent epidemic is ruining life and productivity. In the UK, the Health and Safety Executive estimate that 12.8 million days were lost to stress, anxiety and depression. In contrast, just 276,000 days were lost to strike action: for every day lost to strike action, 46 days are lost to stress. In the USA, 40% of workers report that their work is stressful or very stressful. None of this will come as a surprise, because careers are more or less tailor-made for stress and burnout. To tame the beast of stress, first you have to understand it. Here are five major causes of stress, and what you can do to mitigate them. ● Lack of control – Pressure, if we have control, helps us raise our game. Keep the pressure but take away the control and you discover stress: you no longer control your destiny. Managers used to make things happen through people they controlled, which made their life easy. Now you have to make things happen through people you do not control, or do not want to be controlled. You rely on people – colleagues, customers, bosses, suppliers. You can never regain full control. Instead, you have to learn a new set of skills around influencing and persuasion: building networks of trust and support; managing conflict and opposition; pushing your agenda and making the organisation work for you. These are skills which separate a 21st century leader from a 20th century leader. ● Ambiguous work – Professionals cannot measure success in terms of how many tonnes of pig iron they have shifted in the day. It may be possible to measure inputs (how many hours worked) but it
is much harder to measure outputs, and especially quality of outputs: how good was that report, meeting or presentation, really? Ambiguity also makes it hard to say ‘no’ to requests for more work. Your defence against ambiguity is clarity of goals and expectations, both with yourself and with your boss. Clarity lets you focus on what really matters and say ‘no’ more often. You may still choose to take on discretionary work, but you will be better able to control it. ...clarity of goals and expectations, both with yourself and with your boss ● Technology – This enables us to work 24/7, but just because something is possible it does not mean it is good. Although no one works 24/7, it can feel like it. In the past, when leaders left the office, they left work. Now, the office follows you wherever you are. The result is that we co-mingle work and leisure: we check social media at work, and check emails at home. In practice, the best performers know how to switch off: a vital part of training for top athletes are weekly rest days. To perform well, you have to manage expectations and yourself to give yourself detox time when you can recover daily, weekly and annually. Rest is not for wimps, rest is for high performance with lower stress. ● Professional pride – Professionals want to do a good job, but ambiguous work means that your work is never done. If you have to write a report, there
is always another view you could canvass and another fact you could check. That is a recipe for late nights and anxiety as the deadline approaches. The reality however is that more is not better. A good presentation, like a good book or article, is not complete when you can say no more: it is complete when you can say no less. To reduce stress, focus on quality not quantity: be crystal clear about what you need to achieve, focus on that and dispense with any unnecessary activity. ● Unsupportive relationships do not help – In the days of lifetime employment, employer and employee were locked together and it was in their mutual interest to support each other. That contract has gone – average job tenure is now is just over five years. Staying employed no longer relies on your employer, but on your employability. And there is always someone younger, cheaper, hungrier with more up to date skills waiting to take your job. To minimise the risk and stress of this uncertainty, you have to keep on learning and changing. Take the opportunity to try new things, keep your skills and experience fresh and you can turn uncertainty into opportunity. Outside work, close knit families are giving way to looser networks of relationships. Within this network, cultivate some relationships you can rely on because a problem shared is a problem halved, and a pleasure shared is a pleasure doubled. n A stress-free life would be a life of boring under-achievement. Accept stress and success often walk hand in hand. Once you understand the causes of stress, you can maximise the success and minimise the stress.
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | March 2020 | Issue 58 22
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