Years ago I knew a manager who believed that high stress yielded the best productivity, he generated that environment by setting unrealistic deadlines and generating plenty of consequence-fear (I, and my fellow recruiters, considered his organization our happy hunting ground). The year his department’s turnover hit 99%, which was everyone except him, he was finally terminated.

There are still too many managers who run stress-filled organizations and too many companies that ignore, allow, and even support them—it’s called performance culture—but, as they say, these times they are a’changin’—even if it takes suicide as the wake-up call for some.

“Earlier this year, the French automaker, Renault, found itself doing some soul-searching following a rash of suicides at a design complex outside Paris. In the course of about five months, three engineers killed themselves. In suicide notes and conversations with their families before taking their lives, the three men voiced anxiety about unreasonable workloads, high-pressure management tactics, exhaustion, and humiliating criticism in front of colleagues during performance reviews.”

And companies are starting to get it, “Draper Laboratory, an R&D shop based in Cambridge, Mass., refuses to buy BlackBerrys for its engineers.”How can anyone be creative if they are on’ 24 hours a day?” asks HR Director Jeanne Benoit. “We want to keep them fresh and robust.”"

Another recent finding adds another significant reason to reduce worker stress, touching on businesses’ greatest bogyman—obesity and its effect on worker health.

“Scientists reported yesterday that they have uncovered a biological switch by which stress can promote obesity, a discovery that could help explain the world’s growing weight problem…”

Now you have two negatives—death and obesity—and two positives—creativity and retention; separately or together they have an enormous impact on the bottom line.

Here are six things you can do to reduce stress in our organization. No, they won’t get it done in a day, but there aren’t any silver bullets for organizational changes (or anything else, for that matter)—especially those involving individual MAP—all you can do is start and then keep going.

Finally, if you run a company, or any organization, and you don’t heed this wake-up call to start reducing negative stress then, as a manager, you are heading for the same fate as the dodo bird.

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Business info, Communication, Culture, Leadership, Motivation, Retention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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