Stress has risen across the board in all
occupations, and is now cited by 36
per cent of professionals, 34
per cent of managers and
22
per cent of skilled workers. Three of the ten occupations with the highest rates
of stress are in education, and five in the top twenty: Jane has plenty of
company for her predicament. Forty-one per cent of those who work in education
report a high level of stress, well ahead of any other occupational category
(for nursing the figure is 31.5 per
cent, and for management 27.8
per cent).
Professor Michael Rose of Bath University
researched stress for the Economic Social Research Council, and concluded that
the education system arguably lies at the core of the national stress
problem'.' Working in the public sector increases your chances of stress: nearly
40
per cent of the NHS's workforce report
stress, as do 30
per cent of employees in local government. In
comparison, the private sector is doing much better, with only 21
per cent of workers reporting stress. You
have a higher chance of stress if you
have a degree, and are divorced, separated or widowed.' Stress levels
are highest for those in their forties, although they are rising fast in younger
age groups: the number of `twenty-somethings' affected by workplace stress
doubled in 2001–02,
according to one study.' Stress is twice as
likely for those in full-time as in part-time employment, but there is no
significant difference in incidence between the sexes, nor in geographical
location.
The most striking finding of the research is
that stress is often the price of success. The higher your salary, the greater
chance you have of stress, while
assembly-line workers, cleaners and shelf-fillers
are the kinds of jobs which report the lowest levels of stress. Nearly a third
of people earning over £20,000
a year have high levels of stress – three
times the proportion of those on salaries below £10,000. Interestingly, when
this high-income bracket is broken down, it's the middle-ranking managerial and
technical category which suffers the highest stress levels, rather than those at
the very top. The twenty-five most stressful jobs are all white-collar and
mostly professional-managerial, found Professor Rose, who comments
unsympathetically that `For the most part, they are at least well compensated
both financially and in terms of status for so often living on their nerve
endings.' He found that these high levels of stress are not incompatible with
job satisfaction – work can be stressful and enjoyable at the same time. But he
also found that high levels of job satisfaction do not necessarily translate
into high scores on the scale of contentment. An exciting, demanding job may be
enjoyable and rewarding, but it won't necessarily make you happy. In fact,
contrary to what might be expected, well-being seems to be related to
less
job satisfaction, claims Rose: `Employees
with low job satisfaction have high
feel-good scores and vice versa.' Six
of the ten occupations with the highest proportions of `happy'
workers were blue-collar – for example, plant
operatives, bus drivers and gardeners
– while security guards are close to the bottom for job satisfaction, but in the
top twenty for `feel-good'."
It's a puzzling phenomenon that it is the
workers in the high-status, high-income areas of the labour market, with the
most bar-gaining power, who have failed to slow the deterioration of their
working conditions, let alone improve them. It is the managerial and
professional categories of the workforce that are worst affected by stress, that
have traded in well-being for job satisfaction.
The problem about stress is that it cannot be
alleviated simply by tinkering with a few of the worst characteristics of
pressure and competition; it is a direct consequence of the `performance
culture', which expects more and more, but which offers little security in
return, a culture which makes one's job a tricky feat of balancing on a high
wire. Many of those contacting me had experienced acute stress. A social worker
emailed:
I think stress at work is partly about how
well defended one is against such pressures. I was
off
work with stress for two months. I learned a
lot about my own limits and how to look after myself, and now feel confident I
would never get to that point again. Capitalism doesn't really have any limits
on how much it is prepared to demand of people, so workers themselves need to
decide where the boundaries are.
It was a point echoed by a software support
co-ordinator:
I've been down the path of working every
hour possible and at weekends in a bid to try and keep up with the demands of my
job at the time. It finally got to me, and I ended up having to take some time
off work to sort my head out. So I concluded that this couldn't go on. It didn't
get me a pay rise or any recognition from my boss, just more to deal with at
work and stress in my relationship with my partner. So why was I doing this if I
hated it so much? I couldn't answer that — I had a big guilt complex about not
being able to handle the workload, and shame about letting people down, and I
had my own pride to deal with, I guess. Having taken a long hard look at myself,
I realised that not everything is my fault and down to me. So I stopped, and
imposed boundaries for my sanity's sake.
Stress costs British business over £400
million a year, and the Health and
Safety Executive predict that the bill will continue to rise. The World Health
organizaion estimates that stress will account for half of the ten most common
medical problems in the world by 2020. The economic costs, and the threat of
legal action, have alarmed employers and governments alike; it is these, rather
than the human cost, which are driving government policy – it is the Secretary
of Trade and Industry who comments on stress, not the
Health Secretary.
Over the last decade there has been a huge
amount of research into the causes of
stress, yet its incidence has continued to soar. Little has come out of the
research except a burgeoning industry which offers stress consultants, stress
programmes, stress counsellors,
therapists and, when all that fails, lawyers to fight stress
claims. This amounts to a dramatic failure of collective will either to
recognise the extent of the problem or to do anything effective about it. All
that is offered are sticking plasters to cover the symptoms, rather than the
kind of reform of the workplace which is required to tackle the causes.
According to one major study into the causes
of stress, 68 per cent of the highly stressed report work intensification as a
major factor. Fifty-five per cent of these said they had to work very fast in
their job, and only 10 per cent said they `often have enough time to do
everything'; 33
per cent said they
never
have enough time. The highly stressed
reported `many interruptions' in their jobs, and a lot of responsibility. Long
working hours are a major cause of
high stress, with
34.6
per cent of the highly stressed saying
that they often have to work long or unsociable hours. Unpredictable hours add
to the stress, affecting 21 per cent of the highly stressed, and they are more
likely to report atypical working hours, at night and on the weekends.
Finally, the study looked at a number of
factors relating to workers' sense of control and autonomy in their jobs — one
of the areas regarded as particularly important for stress. The study separated
out what is likely to cause stress and what seems to have no effect. Falling
into the first category is pace
of work: the highly stressed have
less say over their pace of work, when they can take a break and when they can
take a holiday. On the other hand, having a say over one's work environment,
choosing who to work with, being able to take decisions concerning one's
work, having a choice about what one
does at work or how one does it, surprisingly
have little impact on stress levels. The kind of autonomy offered as a
much-lauded characteristic of the modern workplace does not
in fact reduce stress, while the loss of
control over the pace of work — an
endemic feature of British work intensification — is a major contributor to it.
The longest-running research on stress is the
Whitehall Study of 10,308 civil
servants, which found that stress was related to three variables: the amount of
control the employee had in the job, the demands of the job, and the degree of
support from colleagues and managers. How the three interacted was where the
stress resulted; for example, if the support was excellent, an employee was more
likely to be able to manage high job demands, but if the support was weak, even
a low-demand job could be stressful. The study identified one other
source of stress — the `effort—reward imbalance':
workers are more likely to be stressed if they feel they are putting a lot of
effort into the job for few rewards such as income, pro-motion and recognition.
The highly stressed also expect `undesirable
change' in their work situation, they are more likely to say their job security
is poor, and to feel that they are unfairly treated at work. The level and pace
of continuous change is singled out by Professor Cary L. Cooper of the
University of Lancaster in his work with Professor Les Worrall as an
increasingly important contributor to stress, leading to both a sharply
increased degree of job insecurity and `change fatigue'. Cooper found that 70
per cent of British managers are affected by major organizaional restructuring
every year, and 40
per cent experienced redundancy and
delayering — as survivors, not victims. Sixty-four per cent of those questioned
in 2000 felt that morale had fallen as a result,
53
per cent that motivation had fallen, and
60
per cent that job security had deteriorated.
Cooper concludes that two factors are driving the stress epidemic: `It began
with Thatcher Americanising Britain and bringing in the gung-ho macho long-hours
culture. That laid the foundations for two things which are driving stress: the
assumption that long hours means more efficient — all the research proves that
long hours means ill health and the breakdown of relationships, and we simply
don't know what it does for productivity — and secondly, job insecurity. The
sources of stress are overload, constant change and its poor management and the
way people are managed generally.'
The result of more pressure on organizaions
is an increase in bullying, another major source of stress, adds Cooper.
According to his investigation for the TUC, a staggering one in four of all
workers reported having been bullied in the previous six months, 47 per cent in
the previous five years." The bullied have a higher incidence of
mental illness, but so also do those colleagues who
witness
the bullying; Cooper calls this `passive
bullying', and just like passive smoking, it can make you ill.
The Bristol Stress and Health at Work Study
identified other stressors, such as inconsistency and lack of clarity. Highly
stressed workers were less likely to say that the information they got from
their line managers was sufficient and consistent, and were more likely to be
subject to expectations which were hard to combine or even contradictory. This
is a particularly significant point in explaining the dramatic increase in
stress in the public sector, and was echoed in the Whitehall Study, which found
that `the need to resolve conflicting priorities' is associated with a higher
risk of psychiatric disorder in both sexes.
The stories Peter Piranty hears in the course
of his counselling for a Northamptonshire-based mental health charity which
specialises in stress in the public sector confirm many of these findings. His
clients come predominantly from education, the police, the NHS and social
services. He attributes the sharp increase in stress in the public sector to
the way in which the government's reform of public services has been
implemented. What most worries him is how the pressure to meet targets, and the
public scrutiny, poison some organizaional cultures:
There's been a real increase in the last ten
years in the blame culture as many more people are talking about bullying.
[Under pressure] some organizaions become unhealthy and defensive, with
paranoid, persecutory cultures. It can be quite subtle, and a whole
organizaional culture can be bullying, so that managers say things like, `Don't
come to me with problems, come to me with .' I hear appalling stories
of senior teams frightened of the style of a senior officer — in any other
situation it wouldn't be tolerated. I hear of rigid ways of behaviour — of
defining what excellence is, and what commitment is. My conclusion is that a lot
of the British workforce are very unhappy, and there's a lack of recognition of
the emotional costs of the workplace.
When an organizaion is driven, symptoms of
stress can manifest in two ways. One is to put your nose down and deal with what
you can deal with. The other is to take a lot of interest in other people's
failings, which leads to inter-group rivalry and dysfunctional teams. If people
are frightened of being accused of not being able to do their job, they will
pick on another weak member of the team; there's macho talk of `If you can't
stand the heat, keep out of the kitchen.' The bullied person often takes on the
responsibility.
The drive to increase accountability and
transparency in the public sector increases the pressure, adds Piranty:
Before, you might have had a private
discourse about a cock-up; now it's all very public. So many people think they
know how you should do the job, and people's jobs become more difficult. Social
workers, for example, are damned if they do and damned if they don't; society
tasks people to make those awful judgements and then disembowels them in a very
public way.
organizaions are always working to
capacity, there's no reserve because it's argued that it's too wasteful. People
are working at such a level that it only takes one more thing — a personal
crisis or work crisis [for them to snap] — there's no reserve. Some mission
statements can be really crass, for example, `Zero tolerance of defects'. People
are expected to `strive for excellence' rather than be good enough.
A high proportion of the people coming to
see us are on anti-depressants, they don't see much of their kids and they're
bitterly resentful that they don't have more time at home.
Piranty says that people who are particularly
vulnerable to stress are `those who are very good at caring for others and who
will put their clients first. There's a high burnout among carers, who are very
good at looking after others but not so good at looking after themselves. A lot
of people in the public sector are dealing with life and death – we ask
them to do these jobs, but don't give them the space to recharge.'
Piranty's comments are the
consequence of many issues: the breakdown of trust, the obsessive
accountability, the loss of respect for the
public sector, the pressure to reconcile competing priorities – to be
more efficient and to provide a
better service – which make the jobs of many public servants close to
intolerable.
Every employer in the country
has been forced to take stress seriously since the groundbreaking legal case of
John Walker's successful claim against Northumberland County Council, for which
he was awarded a settlement of £200,000
in 1994. The key to that case was that avoidance of stress was ruled
part of the employer's `duty of care' to the employee under health and safety
legislation. Walker, a social worker, had a nervous breakdown because of his
increased workload; his employers recognised the problem, but did nothing to
improve the situation on his return to work. Thus
Walker
was able to argue successfully that his second nervous break-down was
foreseeable.
Another significant case was
that of Barry Willans, who was the first ever individual to take a private firm,
Reckitt & Colman, to court for stress-induced anxiety and depression. Derby
County Court ruled that the stress was caused by the pressure to meet
performance targets set for him. Willans successfully argued that he had been
given increased responsibilities and reduced support staff in 1991. The court
ruled that the company should have adjusted his duties or offered assistance to
avoid him being placed under dangerous stress, and awarded him £55,000.
In another case, Thelma
Conway, a social worker, was put in sole charge of a residential home in 1996
with no additional training. Despite her frequent reports to management that she
was struggling, and external inspection reports recommending a more experienced
manager, she was left in post for four years. Unison took her case to court, the
council admitted liability and she was awarded £140,000 in compensation.
Partly because of the
publicity generated by such cases, injury claims for work-related stress leapt
twelve-fold between 1999 and 2000,
from 516 to 6,428.
Stress/post-traumatic stress disorder is now the biggest `injury' both in the
number of awards made by courts and the total amount of compensation paid out,
according to figures compiled for one union. This dramatic increase has been
slightly checked by an important Court of Appeal ruling in February
2002, which stated that the onus
is on the employee to alert management to stress-related problems, otherwise
employers can generally assume that he or she is up to the demands of the job.
This adds a further hurdle to what was already difficult to
prove, namely that the stress was
foreseeable, and that it was caused
by workplace pressures rather than a personal or domestic situation
(of course, the reality is that the two can
often interact). The emphasis on foreseeability particularly frustrates
trade unions which are campaigning for a
preventative approach, arguing that stress should
be routinely included in risk assessments of
health and safety issues.
In August
2003 the Health and Safety
Executive (HSE), the government body responsible for enforcing legislation on
working conditions in Britain, upped the ante and issued its first `enforcement
notice' against an NHS hospital for failing to protect its workers from stress.
It told West Dorset Hospitals NHS Trust that it had to assess stress levels and
introduce measures to bring them down, and
that if it failed court action would follow, with the threat of fines.
The HSE has launched a pilot scheme to measure and reduce stress by setting
certain targets: for example, at least 85
per cent of employees must say they can cope with the demands of the
job, and at least 65 per cent
must say they are not subjected to unacceptable behavior, including bullying.
The TUC is pressing for these standards to be incorporated into legislation, so
that employers have a duty to prevent stress arising in the first place.
Large payouts in the courts, the threat of
government fines and tougher legislation have led many employers to take
seriously the issue of `resilience' – both of the organization and of the
individual. How can the organization maintain the pace without burning out its
staff and ending up with massive injury claims? (For those at senior levels in
many companies, this tricky question no doubt adds considerably to their own
stress levels.) The response, of course, has been to get the paperwork right –
to put policies and procedures in place which will protect the organization in a
court case. Rather than questioning how they operate and the way employees' jobs
are done, organizations reach for a quick fix, such as offering a confidential
counselling service. But do these have any effect? One study in 1996 of nine
organizations with counselling services found that they led to improvements in
`mental well-being and physical well-being . . . but not in job satisfaction or
sources of pressure', and that while `counselling is aimed at helping
people cope with their personal lives and work lives better', `it
does not have a measurable impact at the organizational level'. It concluded by
urging that `more potential lies in the direction of job design and
organizational change'.
But that is precisely what employers are most
reluctant to consider; instead, they personalize the issue, and place the
emphasis firmly on the individual. For example, Marks and Spencer's policy on
stress states that the company `seeks to place responsibility for managing
stress with the individual and likes individuals to take some responsibility for
that management', and to `enhance the individual's ability to deal with pressure
regardless of the source'. Not surprisingly given that kind of
approach, in 2002 nearly 80 per cent of those who said they were stressed never
sought any professional help, although an increasing proportion of them at least
admit they need help (even if they don't get it).
