With today's competitive pressures and tighter company resources, employees are continuing to feel high levels of workplace stress. Employers have higher expectations and financial performance targets as well as individual performance targets; however, while many employers have added back some workers lost during the layoffs of 2008 and 2009, these employers are remaining lean for the most part, says Laura Sejen, global practice leader, rewards of Towers Watson, a global professional services company in New York City.
"We're operating with fewer resources, and there are more expectations," Sejen says. "When you put those things together, it's no surprise that you have this excessive pressure theme."
Even a recent Towers Watson survey finds that 71 percent of employers report that their employees are working more hours over the past three years, and another 53 percent of employers believe this will become the status quo over the next three years. Consequently, 30 percent of employees say they are feeling excessive pressure on the job.
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If an employer fails to manage this high level of employee stress, it can expect to see a lower level of engagement and higher risk of attrition, Sejen says. From a business standpoint, this often leads to poor outputs in terms of volume and quality. Other workplaces issues, of course, can also lead to disengagement, but a stressful work environment has the potential to create a greater problem because employees must deal with this on a daily basis.
For example, an employee might be upset because his or her bonus or pay raise wasn't as big as expected, but that isn't necessarily on that employee's mind each day in the office. Workplace stress, however, is not going away.
"This is more constant," Sejen says. "This is your work environment every day, so it can have a bigger impact on levels of associate engagement."
An employer should be dedicated to building a healthy work environment in which employees achieve a balance between work and their personal lives, but fewer than half of employee respondents at 46 percent say their organizations do so. To build this healthy work environment, Sejen recommends that an employer enlists the help of its frontline managers because they have a major impact on employees' daily work experience.
"It's the immediate manager who sets goals, reviews performance, and addresses issues or helps remove any obstacles," Sejen says. "The immediate manager can make sure that work is evenly distributed across the team or deal with team members who are not pulling their weight. Not all but a lot of the healthy work environment rests at the doorstep of the immediate manager.
But employers should not simply expect managers to know how to create a healthy work environment. While managers understand how to supervise employees from a business standpoint, ensuring a healthy work-life balance isn't always as easy.
"This is the softer side of being an effective manager," Sejen says. "Managers are well rewarded for delivering on budget, but it's a harder for them when they're responsible for having a healthy team. There is work to be done on the part of companies in helping that frontline manager understand some of these things that we've been talking about."
Another part of a healthy work environment includes creating a culture that encourages employees to approach managers when the workload is too great, Sejen says. Often, employees are overextended, especially in today's lean work force, but they do not feel comfortable asking their managers to help reprioritize the extra work. This might mean extending deadlines for less important projects or delegating tasks to other employees. However these tasks are reprioritizes, the decrease in stress improves upon that healthy work environment employers should strive to achieve.
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