The link between stress, emotional intelligence, + highly productive teams in tech organizations
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, now more than ever, workplace stress in America has become a serious threat to workers’ overall wellbeing and health, ultimately threatening and weakening organizations. But what exactly counts as work stress? It’s not the challenges that energize you psychologically and physically and that motivate you to learn and problem solve (“good stress”). It is when job requirements fail to match the capabilities, resources, or needs of the employee, causing negative and often harmful physical and emotional responses (“bad stress”).
With job stress becoming an increasing problem, researchers have conducted numerous surveys and studies to find out how many employees are affected and what type of mental and physical health problems they are experiencing as a result. Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace report shows that in 2021, stress among the world’s workforce reached an all time high, with 44% of employees experiencing stress a lot of the previous day. In the U.S. and Canada, that number is higher with 50% of employees experiencing daily stress that can be categorized as “bad stress.”
So how do you, as a CHRO, reduce workplace stress?
On the front lines of tech stress
As technology progresses, we are pushed further into an online world. As a result, there are more and more security issues with hackers trying to breach and disrupt companies and organizations in this online space; at ORCA HR, we work with many tech companies, and see stress in the cybersecurity sector as a particularly acute scenario.
One concern of a past client from a cybersecurity organization was how these security breaches were impacting the workers who had to prevent or fix these issues, especially since these breaches caused severely negative PR.
According to a report from IBM, the majority of cybersecurity incident responders think the rise of ransomware has exacerbated the stress and psychological demands—with 67% of cybersecurity incident responders said they experience stress and anxiety in their daily lives as a result of responding to an incident.
To help this company, we created a stress management workshop that helped workers identify, acknowledge, and control their stress, which was becoming pervasive even when there wasn’t an active breach.
Discovering your workplace stressors
One tool that we like using to assess stress is the TTI SI Stress Quotient Assessment tool. This is a diagnostics tool that focuses on workplace culture and helps to determine and measure one’s stressors. It does so by analyzing stress in 7 different dimensions to help pinpoint which areas your team might be struggling in.
The seven dimensions include:
- Workplace Demands
- Effort and Reward Balance
- Control
- Organizational Change
- Management Issues
- Social Support
- Job Security
Each of these categories have their own set of characteristics and responses which can affect performance on an individual or team-wide level.
Understanding where stress resides within the seven dimensions of the workplace
- Workplace Demands
- Stress resulting from excessive demand happens when workloads become overwhelming or skills or talents don’t match the position.
- Reflect: Is my job even designed well enough in terms of what I’m expected to do?
- Effort and Reward Balance
- When high levels of output and effort are met with minimal rewards – whether that be compensation, a promotion or simple recognition for a job well done – an individual’s stress can skyrocket. Without an effort/reward balance, an employee can feel disconnected, unmotivated and even angry.
- Reflect: Is my effort and the reward I receive in balance?
- Control
- Feeling powerless is a universal cause of job stress. Lack of control comes from high responsibility paired with low authority, not being heard, not being involved and others not understanding your work.
- Reflect: Do I have autonomy in my role?
- Organizational Change
- Changes within the organization– from management restructuring to new policies and procedures – impact individuals differently. For some, it brings apprehension, insecurity and confusion – all which can raise stress levels when changes are not properly communicated or understood.
- Reflect: How much organizational change is causing stress?
- Management Issues
- Reasonable directives from your boss should be expected. It’s when he or she creates enormous pressure or challenges, to the point of it hindering your workload, that cause stress to increase.
- Reflect: Is your manager equipped to handle the increasing scale of the work?
- Social Support
- An unsupportive social environment can cause workplace stress. Managers who don’t provide clear and consistent information and co-workers who fail to assist one another leaves employees feeling unengaged and unproductive.
- Reflect: Am I receiving support from others around me?
- Job Security
- Fearing for your job is extremely stressful. However, stress can also be caused by lack of advancement, being promoted too slowly or being promoted too quickly to be successful in the job.
- Reflect: Do I feel secure about my job?
When you’re not aware of certain things, they are going to control you
Workplace stress is something that can have a large negative impact on productivity and employee flourishing if left unchecked. Through the use of the TTI SI Stress Assessment, we are able to analyze stress from many different viewpoints; not just individual stress but also organizational stress. If you can look at the whole system people work in and break it down into types of stress, then you can find the particular stress that needs to be addressed.
Once we are able to pinpoint and defuse the stressors, we are able to begin making progress to reduce their control and impact on performance.
Is your team (or even your whole organization) struggling with stress?
Take a complementary stress assessment and 30 minute consultation. Email experts@orcahrsolutions.com to request yours.
