However, with the recent advent of wellness programs, there's an increasing HR focus on the causes of employee stress related to external issues employees bring into the workplace. Much of the research is showing causes of stress brought into the workplace might create greater problems than stress actually caused in the workplace.

Is there some part of this external employee stress that might be better understood, leading to a reduction of pressure on an employee? Will a better understanding of the causes of the stress brought into the workplace help employers offer or create programs that can reduce or eliminate the external cause?

Consider what employees bring to work

One stress study concluded health conditions like obesity, alcoholism, drug use and related issues may result in much stress in the workplace. These are practices, behaviors, conditions and situations occurring outside the workplace that an employee brings to work with him or her. An unhealthy workplace can bring these hidden thieves to the surface, creating a vicious cycle: The employee brings in external stresses, and a poor work environment intensifies the pressure. Both the company and the employee are losers.

HR and benefits managers must ask: Are there some external factors brought about by circumstances that are beyond the control of employees? If so, what are some of these conditions that seem uncontrollable?

Even some health issues affecting an employee's productivity may be caused by behaviors related to the stresses in their everyday lives. Depression, anger, and even workplace violence can often be traced to factors beyond the workplace that the employee feels to be outside his or her ability to control. If these external circumstances show up more and more frequently at work, the costs to the company mount. Employers may be overlooking the external stress factors when they spend money to implement employee programs designed to reduce obesity, or drug abuse, or smoking, or alcohol abuse, or workplace violence.

Developing programs

If employers want to reduce health care costs by preventing or lessening employee practices and behaviors that endanger their health, managers must focus on programs that uncover and address the underlying causes of employee stress. Focusing on strategies and plans that miss the hidden stressors wastes resources. HR and benefits managers must factor into the stress equation the concealed stresses that fuel certain employee issues before they ignite problems in the workplace.

For example, one set of these external circumstances or circumstances beyond the control of many employees relates to the individual's financial situation, including cash-flow, credit, debt, identity theft and legal problems.

With today's credit crunch, millions of Americans are literally a lawsuit away from being wiped out of their financial position. Each day, hundreds of thousands of employees across the United States receive or dodge calls from creditors seeking to collect on past due debt. Daily, thousands of Americans are dragged into court to defend themselves from lawsuits by creditors.  Every day many Americans file lawsuits against others and against businesses. The current recession has highlighted the threat of financial debt issues and lawsuits, which has never been greater for an increasing number of American employees each day.

Add to this the burgeoning home foreclosures that contribute to the stress weighing heavily on more and more employees. The number of U.S. homes receiving a foreclosure filing was expected to climb about 20 percent in 2011, reaching a peak for the housing crisis, as unemployment remains high and banks resume seizures after a slowdown, RealtyTrac Inc. said.

“We will peak in foreclosures and probably bottom out in pricing, and that's what we need to do in order to begin the recovery,” Rick Sharga, RealtyTrac's senior vice president, said in an interview. “But it's probably not going to feel good in the process.”

 A record 2.87 million properties got notices of default, auction or repossession in 2010, a 2 percent gain from a year earlier, the Irvine, Calif.-based data seller said in a report. The number climbed even after a plunge in filings in the last part of the year—including a 26 percent drop in December—as lenders came under scrutiny for their practices.

This increase in the number of employees and consumers in America being faced with legal problems might cause many to believe that access to lawyers and legal advice is more prevalent than ever.  However, reality indicates that more Americans than ever feel disconnected from the legal system and from accessing needed legal advice, and most have the view that lawyers are inaccessible and too expensive.

More Americans feel disconnected

All these stress-related credit and debt issues are causing tremendous amounts of downward pressure on the psyche of American employees. In addition to the stress created from a myriad of their own financial and legal problems, employees are facing the serious financial and legal pressures of their elderly parents. A new AARP study suggests “older Americans, employed and unemployed, may never recover financially from this latest recession, and more than half don't foresee themselves having enough money to live comfortably in their retirement.”

These are new findings from AARP's latest public policy institute report. The report is a collection of data taken from a survey of more than 5,000 Americans—age 50 and over—who were employed, had been employed, or were seeking employment during the three year recessionary period before they were surveyed online last October.

“Many older Americans have been buffeted by skyrocketing health care costs, dwindling home values, shrinking pension and investment portfolios, and employment struggles,” says John Rother, AARP's executive vice president for policy, strategy and international Affairs. “Even if you have a job, this survey demonstrates that you are not immune to the negative effects of the recession.”

Overall, the recession took a toll on older Americans' finances, savings, health care and employment status. Most troubling, nearly 30 percent of those surveyed reported they had exhausted all their savings during the recession. For those having trouble making ends meet, more than one in three (36.4 percent) stopped or cut back on saving for retirement.

Additionally, recent findings from a Gallup-Healthways well-being index show older Americans (49.5 percent) had problems taking care of financial needs and delayed getting medical or dental care or stopped taking medications. Roughly 13 percent of older Americans also began collecting Social Security benefits, and two-thirds did so earlier than planned. 

“Older Americans have good reason to be worried about the future because they have less time than others to recover from the impact of the last three years,” Rother says. “When older Americans are borrowing against their future or betting against their health, serious challenges lie ahead.”

Whether the workplace becomes the receptacle into which more and more employee stress is poured, or the workplace becomes a safe zone with cost-effective programs that can help manage this stress is a major question today for each human resource and benefits department in every company in America.

Defining Workplace Stress

“Of course, stress is a factor in every one's life, particularly during major events such as marriage, divorce or buying a home,” says Rebecca Maxon, author of the study Stress in the Workplace: A Costly Epidemic. And each of these contributes to higher levels of stress brought into the workplace by employees.

Most HR departments do not spend large amounts of time analyzing the effects of an employee's personal legal or financial issues and their impact on the workplace. But, is a deeper understanding of these needed before we can figure out how to have a healthier workplace? Should these problems be analyzed before we add a number of new programs or initiatives that might cost employers millions of dollars over the next few years, but may not get to the root cause of some of these problems? We will focus on these questions in this series. The answers will put light on the hidden stressors that are so harmful to employees and hurtful to companies. We will discover solutions as we probe questions like these:

Can there be a reasonably simple solution that will eliminate or diminish a large part of the stress that employees bring into the workplace? 

Is it possible that some parts of employee stress can actually be reduced rather easily? If so, how much will gaining this understanding cost employers? 

Will programs that are put in place to combat this stress really result in a healthier workplace? 

What if there is an easy solution to a large part of this problem? 

What if a solution exists that has been overlooked by many HR departments? 

What if the solution ends up costing the employer virtually nothing to implement? 

What if the employer savings are tremendous?

To diminish employee stress and save millions of dollars in the workplace will require vital HR actions. First, HR must understand the huge impact of the hidden stressors. Second, HR must recognize that some parts of this stress-related concern for employees may have a definitive solution. Third, HR must see how to choose the right solution. Fourth, HR has to determine that the solution is relatively inexpensive, and that the solution may be right in front of its eyes, and may not cost the employer any money. That discovery and its implementation will reduce the hefty costs businesses are bearing because of the hidden stressors' impact on employees.