The real reason work is so stressful

Your average working day

Yesterday – bang on time for the pre-year-end panic that afflicts every workplace I’ve ever experienced – KornFerry published a survey on stress at work.  Surprise, surprise, nearly two out of every three respondents said their stress levels were higher than five years ago.  Two thirds claimed stress had disrupted their sleep; over three quarters blamed stress for problems in their personal relationships.  KF say – and who am I to question? – that workplace stress has risen by nearly 20% over the last three decades.

Is work really that bad?  Is it getting worse?  And what, if anything, can we do about it?

Let’s get some perspective

Work in the rich world could be a darn sight worse.  Not many of us would swap our lot for a gig putting together iPhones at Foxconn’s factories in Shenzen,  where you earn around $4 a day for a 12hr shift, minus a lunch break if you don’t keep up with targets and plus public shaming and forced confession if you break one of the multiple workplace rules.  Nor would I recommend stepping back in time: the (hotly contested) provisions of the 1844 Factory Act included such radical worker-protection as banning women and children from being forced to clean heavy machinery while it was in motion, requiring factory owners to disinfect their premises every 14 months, and limiting women and children’s shifts to 12hrs daily.  Oh, and if any worker died on the job, that had to be reported to a doctor.  What more could child protection advocates want?

But work today is increasingly stressful

Nevertheless, the 2,000 respondents to KF’s survey had a point: work today is increasingly stressful.  The UK’s Labour Force Survey shows an upward trend in workplace stress over the past three years, with a total of 10 million (!) working days lost to stress over that period.

Not all stressed workers are equal

Stress is, sadly, different for girls.  Women are 42% more likely to suffer stress at work than men, and though middle-aged men are almost as stressed as the average woman; middle aged women are almost twice as stressed as the average man.

Classic corporate jobs are, to my surprise, probably more stressful than start-ups - people working in larger (250+ employee) organisations are almost twice as likely to suffer stress as those working in small businesses. 

Some jobs are clearly more stressful than others.  Professional workers (the responders to the KF survey) are almost five times more likely to have suffered from increased stress in the past year than skilled trades.  Digging down into that data, it appears that the most stressed professionals are those in the public service caring professions – teachers, nurses, social workers – plus lawyers, probably all for obvious reasons.

So, if you’re a male plumber in your early twenties working with a couple of mates, life’s a breeze.  If you’re a middle-aged female lawyer working in a big not-for-profit, good luck keeping your temper with your loved ones and getting a decent night’s sleep.

Tough on stress, tough on the causes of stress

But let’s get back to the recent increase in stress.  Where could it be coming from? 

The Labour Force Survey put the blame squarely on workload – that sinking feeling that you will never get to the end of your to-do list accounts for almost half of all reported stress (lack of support at work and violence/threats/bullying were also worryingly prominent).  Interestingly, over three quarters of the KF professionals were more worried about not having enough work than about being over-committed and almost the same number said they would prefer more work and money rather than taking a pay cut in return for less pressure,…which probably says more about professional insecurity than it does about manageable workloads.

The fact is, working all hours does not work.  Put 50+ hours a week and the scientific consensus is that you will be up to 25% less productive, up to 30% more likely to have relationship problems, 60% more at risk of a heart attack and far less likely to keep slim, be happy, stay off drugs and turn up to work the next day.  If you are doing anything remotely creative or challenging, think about cutting back to around 20 hours a week – there’s compelling evidence that you could double your productivity that way.

The real cause of work stress - and how to fix it

So should we all speak truth to power and tell our bosses we’re knocking off after lunch in the interests of increasing productivity? 

Good luck with that one – especially as the KF survey found the number one source of stress for professionals was, you guessed it, their boss (and don’t waste more valuable time fantasising about him/her getting the sack – 80% of those same stressed professionals blamed a change in leadership for increasing the pressure). 

Think you can hold tight until a robot takes your job?  Dream on, baby – there’s no evidence that workloads or stress are decreasing for those human workers who remain in rapidly-automating industries.  If anything, I suspect the reverse…

…because one thing that has changed over recent years, in lock-step with the increase in stress, is the way our jobs are designed.  Everyone from startups to corporates has begun to define work not in terms of jobs or responsibilities but in terms of micro-tasks and micro-goals with continuous micro-measurement of Key Performance Indicators or similar.  This cuts immediate task-completion costs dramatically, but at the cost of increased stress and crashing productivity.  The average human brain makes up around 2% of our body weight but uses at least 20% of the energy our body requires.  The most energy-intensive brain work is that which requires rapid switching between tasks – it cuts productivity by around 40% compared to focusing on one thing. 

This gigification of work explains the rise in the inherent stress of jobs found by the UK Labour Force Survey and the rise in manager-induced stress found by KornFerry’s survey.  If we want to reduce the stress in our working lives, a better response than encouraging over-stressed workers to improve their time management or take up stretching would be to design work around people.  That way not only are we likely to make work a less stressful place, we could even get better results.

I’ll be talking more about how to make this a reality – and how the robots can help – in future posts.