Stress, by itself, is not the problem. Our research shows that elevated “chronic stress” levels in workers increase the risk of stress-based disability by only a modest factor of 35% as compared to a normally stressed workforce. More to the point, when higher stress is accompanied either by decreased “work satisfaction” or by decreased “work engagement” amongst employees, then the risks of stress disability rise by factors of 108% and 152%, respectively … with similar degrading impacts on the work getting done and on turnover of key staff.

Step #3 – First, help the walking wounded. Then, roll back dis-engagement in work teams

 Help the walking wounded to help themselves. Between 15 and 20% of employees today qualify as “walking wounded”. While present on the job, their health, performance and work engagement have been eroded by the toxic cocktail of too much stress plus too little satisfaction for too long. Of these, 30% eventually come forward for help from their HR rep or EAP. Unfortunately, for stigma and related reasons, the remaining 70% suffer (and under-perform) in silence. Slowly wearing out for two to five years in an increasingly toxic state, they suddenly take early retirement, go on long term disability, just resign, launch an employment standards law suit, or they’re fired.

Since most managers understandably prefer to avoid dealing with employees’ personal or coping issues, and since the 70% don’t want to risk being seen as weak by asking for help, what can you do? Can you actually “market” self-management training and coaching or the EAP more successfully? You bet you can.

Relying on (a) a motivating “from stress to wellness” lunch-and-learn, plus (b) the power of the internet to then confidentially tailor personalized “pull marketing” messages to each employee, you can dramatically increase the likelihood of walking wounded employees’ seeking help. Here are the step-by-step personalized messages these employees need to buy into, then act on …

The key is to help each of the walking wounded to own and then connect their specific “pain” to solution steps which are personalized, simple and confidential. Working with a large newspaper chain, the Institute improved earlier and more constructive EAP utilization by 32% within three months. Long term disability cases dropped accordingly by year end.

Roll back team dis-engagement. Having taken action to reduce the walking wounded numbers, what can you do to prevent others’ taking their place in this toxic pipeline? … to actually reverse the dis-engagement, the root cause, in the workplace?

“This is a good place to work” or “It’s a sweatshop” are very subjective … mindsets largely determined by a work team’s culture, less so by the “facts”.

So, while reducing toxic risks in a team is, to be sure, about maintaining “good” working conditions, it is as much about fostering a team mindset and culture in which the core belief is, “This place isn’t perfect but, by and large, it responds well to our needs and ideas … especially about the stress and satisfactions we have in our work”.

Extensive research at the Canadian Institute of Stress shows that a simple employee-driven method we call “win~win problem solving”, built into routine team operations, is highly effective in creating and, then, protecting this “good place to work” mindset.

As today’s workplaces change more rapidly and become more demanding, lose~lose problems can grow like viruses in an unprotected computer … causing lose’s for employees’ stress and satisfaction levels and, simultaneously, lose’s for the productivity, quality, etc. aims of the employer. And, because employees often neither care nor dare, or have the time to report, “We have a problem”, these lose~lose problems quickly compound into toxic wastes for the business.

Here’s one of several thousand lose~lose’s I’ve seen employees identify and then solve. Over 1200 customer service reps at the headquarters of a large financial services company, who often were busy on several phones at once, were now asked to log and profile every call in terms of seven call factors. They felt that this additional distracting work, while keeping customers on-hold, not only added more stress but also drained their satisfaction in trying to give top notch service. The full lose~lose showed up when they confessed that more often than not, they just invented the seven-factor data at the end of the day. Ouch! Employees’ win~win proposal was simply to profile only 20% of the calls … a real cost saving which not only gave the company truly representative data about customers but also fell within the employees’ view of reasonable daily stress. As we phased in several such win~win employee proposals, employees began to re-engage with their work.

While previously jaded employees are often initially skeptical about win~win problem solving, the benefits for their stress and satisfaction levels quickly win them over. Unlike other business process improvement methods, win~win problem solving not only produces significant cost savings, it also explicitly places equal value on employees’ feelings about their work, and on their insights about how it should be managed. As one airline reservations agent said to me, “Finally, they’re respecting that I know my job and my customers better than they do”.

Reflecting employees’ more positive mindset, indicators we’ve tracked have shown 32% and 38% improvements in measures of stress and of work satisfaction respectively, plus a 62% gain on the key “engagement” factor … the 180 o opposite of toxicity. As for the several other D.D.T. indicators, the Institute has observed 7% and 13% gains in reliable measures of productivity and quality-of-service, respectively, in telephone operators, plus a 52% reduction in their disability days.

“It’s not rocket surgery” , as Yogi Berra might say. (1) Target the problem for what it is. It’s not the “stress”, it’s the toxic wastes arising from disengagement, which commonly also include fraud, theft and lying to customers. (2) Understand where toxic disengagement is really coming from. And then (3) tackle the truly pressing business-case lose~lose’s which, in most workplaces, stem from (a) under-performance by the walking wounded, and (b) the “going from bad to worse” mindset in toxic dis-engaged work teams.

The old solutions to workplace stress have had limited success because they focused primarily on reducing employee distress problems, with the collateral belief that this would somehow (?) improve business results.

We now know that a more balanced win~win strategy is essential, integrating heart-and-head aims. The tipping point in that balance is to focus directly on how dis-engagement drives the toxic wastes in the workplace, where human pain and costs to business intersect. The results, as I’ve reported above, are solid and, I hope, inspiring for you.

Contact: Richard Earle, Ph.D. rearle@vitalcorporation.com (416) 237-1828 direct line