"For leaders, understanding what motivates workers can help resolve workplace conflicts, empower staff and lead to better results as a team."
- Deloitte LLP managing director Kim Christfort
~3 minute read~
The quote above comes from some major new research published by the major international consulting firm Deloitte LLP (you can read about it here). It was a big project, gathering the responses from over 23,000 professionals. And the topic was stress.
'Stress' has been getting a lot of play lately in the management and leadership world. Rightfully so, as we'll see it can create a flood of negative effects over time. But the report has a silver-lining: the amount of stress someone can tolerate differs from person to person, and by measuring how well a person can handle stress, you can make better hires and have much more accurate job matching.
What is Stress?
A good place to start would be to define stress. My step-dad is an engineer, and he would define stress as the 'load' placed upon something - an electric line, the foundation of a house, gravity pulling a tower towards the ground. That's a good start - it's some type of 'load' or 'weight' that we all carry.
Let's get more specific: Stress at work can be defined as the harmful physical and emotional responses that occur when the requirements of the job do not match the capabilities, resources, or needs of the worker.
How stress impacts the body
Stress, as a concept, is kind of slippery - it's sometimes hard to imagine and make concrete, so many times you have to look for symptoms. Stress has a number of negative consequences for the body, including:
- Headache
- Muscle tension or pain
- Chest pain
- Fatigue
- Stomach upset
- Sleep problems
How stress impacts the mind
Our bodies are not the only victims of negative side effects from stress. Stress has a profound impact on our psychology, particularly our mood regulation. Here are some common mood related side effects:
- Anxiety
- Restlessness
- Lack of motivation or focus
- Feeling overwhelmed
- Irritability or anger
- Sadness or depression
I've talked with many people over the years who tend to downplay the effects of stress, and in some cases who completely deny it exists. This is a mistake. It can be easy to miss small things that have a huge impact on your organization even when you are paying attention, and those small things grow worse and worse if they are ignored. As you can see from the side effects, stressed out employees are less productive, less thoughtful, and a huge blow to your morale.
Stress impacts people differently!
Here's the good news: stress impacts people very differently. Some people are capable of handling very high levels of stress with little impact. In fact, it may even energize and motivate them! Conversely, there are others who do very poorly with high stress levels. In some instances, even minor levels of stress can bring about the negative effects talked about above.
On top of that, different aspects of people's jobs may cause them stress. For instance, some people have absolutely no problem with a huge amount of work to do, but get extremely stressed out when they are micromanaged. For others, they don't mind having a heavily involved manager as long as they know their job is secure. All of these different dimensions have to be weighed and measured when thinking about the impact of stress.
Controlling stress successfully
Life is stressful. We all have stressors in our lives that effect us. The key to controlling stress, from an organizational perspective, is alignment. That is, making sure people are in the right seat on the bus. It's important to make sure that the jobs in your company that require huge levels of stress are occupied by those who thrive on that stress. On the other hand, jobs that have lower levels of stress should be matched with employees who excel in other ways.
When building out job responsibilities, ask yourself:
- Will this job have high stress levels?
- If it is high stress, in what way is it stressful?
- Workload demands
- Time demands
- Manager demands
- Constant or frequent change demands
- Temporary or unstable position/job
- High or low social demands
- What are potential areas where stress might show up unexpectedly?
Start taking the stress levels of your employees seriously - it's going to cost you a fortune if you don't. We offer a number of solutions to give you a strategic advantage. We can help you benchmark a potential job to help you match candidates, and we can help unveil the behaviors, motivations, skills, stress levels, and emotional intelligence of your potential hires and current employees. Contact us now!