The main sources of stress in the workplace today, identification and solutions

Résumé du document

Stress at work was an unknown topic before its appearance in the context of globalization, which may approximately be dated right after World War two. Western companies were becoming more and more tied to results and new markets, and competition had totally changed the landscape of organizations. While we are introducing the topic of stress at the office, we may assume that the organization of work is the most important direct factor connected to individual behavior inside a company. Managers, executives, and employees, are concerned about and affected by stress. Unfortunately, in such a context, an alternative and global shift is not yet on the agenda. Thus, in a management environment, we must focus on causes and consequences and try to improve situations with maximal adaptation to company rules and organization. In this analysis, we will first focus on the reasons of stress and then seek its causes, the most apparent of which the one that occurs first, is work pressure (by extension, the workload).

Extraits

[...] The main sources of stress in the workplace today, identification and solutions Before appearance of a such context of globalization widely dated right after World War two, stress at work was an unknown topic. Western companies are becoming more and more tied to results and new markets, and competition had totally changed the landscape of work organization. While we are introducing the topic of stress at the office, we can assume that the organization of work is the most important direct factor connected to individual behaviors inside a company. [...]

[...] An executive which receives tasks will be forced to get totally involved in company's result without understanding why, often with no compensations for additional workload and beyond. This situation makes people feel exploited, and a guiltiness feeling progressively becomes thriving: In front of the workload, employees feel that they are not skilled or not productive enough to meet tasks. As seen on documentary on France 2 (“complément d'enquête” the 22th October at 11h15 p.m., translated in English: “complementary survey” the example of an IBM worker who was pressured by his manager. [...]

[...] Then, consequences will vary, from a simple everyday stress to the burnout and the extreme case: suicide. As we will review also by examples and reflexions, other reasons lead to a stress rise and some consequences needs to elaborate strategies to be detected. Then, we will try to introduce some reflexions on how to solve problems. If it is fundamentally hard to change the basis of the system, there is a several of ways to reduce negative stress. First, we will review some solutions to solve problems upstream, to avoid huge stress appearance while workload is increasing. [...]

[...] There is another thing to underline and which is providing stress: accumulation of delays. Working in an international environment is creating distortions between partners and competitors. Thus, it frequently happens that files and reports are sent to a company by email over the night, and what a stress for an employee to discover a fresh new stack of topic to work on during the day. For instance, as a Renault's executive said, such loads of e-mails coming from throughout the world are posted during the weekend, and the staff has the feeling to be already late on the schedule on Monday morning. [...]

[...] The boss simply puts his employee on mandatory vacations, or even sick leaves, and all this people should start on good basis. But, it sometimes happen extreme cases when organizations are too hermetic on human issues To enhance argumentation with examples, we propose to introduce a very symbolic case happened in a Japanese hospital. Toshiro, who was a lead physician in a team of six doctors, was took under an extreme pressure when an important skeleton staff policy was set up inside the organization. [...]