According to the Health and Safety Executive, an estimated 875,000 workers were suffering from work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2022/23, resulting in an estimated 17.1 million working days lost, an average of 19.6 days off sick per person.
When looking at the causes of work-related stress, the Labour Force Survey reported workload, particularly regarding tight deadlines, too much work, or too much pressure or responsibility, as key factors. Other factors included a lack of support and organisational changes.
Different types of stress
While stress can sometimes be a good thing – known as eustress – distress often leaves employees feeling unable to cope or out of their depth. Where the issue becomes complicated is when one transforms into the other. While some stress may empower an employee to address their challenges and tackle the problem head on, leaving them feeling rewarded and proud of their achievements, this is most likely when they feel supported by a team, or leadership that celebrates what is learned and achieved, rather than adversely adding to the stress in a way that is problematic in the future.
As individuals, humans are each hardwired in the way they mentally process problems. It’s fascinating to think about, but the way in which individuals each generate ideas, utilise structural elements of procedures or policies to implement them, and even the way in which they respond to rules and group norms is innate. How individual people prefer to do these things has no relationship with how well they will do them. Certainly, people can develop skill and experience over time, but that doesn’t mean it becomes less stressful, perhaps just less obviously so.
So, what does this mean for work-related stress?
According to Adaption-Innovation Theory, people can have stress that requires mental coping when their preferred way of thinking and doing is at odds with a particular task or project, a co-worker or boss, or even a team of people.
Some people thrive on details, guidelines, and specified procedures. Others thrive on ambiguous ideas, flexible deadlines, or going back to the drawing board more than once. When the content of the work, the organisational environment, or the expectations of the leadership are at odds with the way in which people prefer to work, stress occurs. A bit of stress on a team can be valuable, it challenges us to think differently and cross gaps to get the job done, creating eustress. If it goes on too long however, is unappreciated or unproductive, or morale and trust are low, then it causes distress in turn. This is when the labour force suffers.
However, both employers and employees can exert some positive influence when this happens.
Employers can:
- Be clear about expectations and timelines related to changes and projects.
- Learn about their employees more adaptive and more innovative preferences and leverage them as strengths for different tasks and teams.
- Acknowledge that some things are more stressful and recognise the effort, such as covering for an absent co-worker or working on a project that is differently structured than an employee’s normal duties.
- Bear the burden of the stress with their employee team members, such as all focusing to get through an audit or working overtime to meet a deadline.
Employees can:
- Learn about their own adaptive and innovative preferences and articulate those with others. For example, one might ask for more information upfront to have what they need to successfully work, others may ask to be micro-managed less and have more flexibility in the product of the work while still meeting a deadline.
- Articulate stress to others in a productive way when working on a new or different task, for example, and support others when they do the same. What is exciting or challenging?
- Value differences of ideas and approaches to the work as innately individual, without assuming that the way in which things are done is the same as how well they might be done.
Highly functioning workplace environments value their employees. While this may typically be focused on the output of that labour, appreciating the way in which people approach the work goes a long way in managing stress. And, when stress is acknowledged and the extra effort recognised, it increases the likelihood that employees will harness the effort needed the next time it happens, and rally others to do the same.
Megan Seibel
Director of the Center for Cooperative Problem Solving at Virginia Tech and aKAI practitioner, Megan Seibel is also a registered nurse. She has authored and co-authored numerous research articles on facilitated leadership and has significant expertise in helping organisations to identify ways to solve problems through adaptation and innovation.
