Coping with office stresses and strains

Stress, like yuppie flu and repetitive strain injury, has often been dismissed as yet another urban myth. But a proliferation of research is supplying more and more evidence of the links between corporate practice and the potential health risks which are now being associated with stress.

Currently, the UK loses about 40 million working days per year or # 7bn in stress-related absenteeism. It cannot be coincidental that the trend to downsize, rationalise and re-engineer has also meant the UK’s average working week has grown to one of the highest in Europe at 43.4 hours.

A sample of recent reports all point to the same thing. A survey by the Institute of Management shows that 41% work at least 50 hours per week – and 13% more than 60 hours. Respondents cite the main causes of stress as incompetence of superiors, poor internal communications, office politics, and time pressures and deadlines. A recent Mind/Personnel Today survey found that 70% believe stress is an inevitable feature of their organisation.

This new awareness does not appear to be a passing fad. Employers should take note of the recent legal landmark made by a social worker who received # 175,000 damages for a nervous breakdown attributed to stress and overwork – a warning signal that the UK is likely to follow the US which has seen a proliferation of stress-related court action.

Big Six attitudes

But how seriously are the accountancy firms taking the issue? The attitude of the Big Six appears to span the spectrum between apathy and proactivity.

Tellingly, three companies contacted – Ernst & Young, Deloitte & Touche and (less surprisingly) press-shy Arthur Andersen – had nothing or little to say on the subject. An E&Y spokesman said: ‘We’ve not found anyone who’s prepared to talk on this subject.’

Deloittes referred the matter onto the personnel director who heads up the national training department, who in turn referred the matter back, refusing an interview and saying that he was ‘chronically busy’ and that ‘no one had ever asked him that question before’. Eventually, the company agreed to give the following statement: ‘As a people business, we are aware of stress in the workplace and seek wherever possible to reduce its likelihood. If our people are stressed-out, they become more ineffective, so our partners understand that stress must be managed.’

Other companies were more forthcoming. Price Waterhouse has linked up with a clinical psychologist, where referral relies on a mixture of employees coming forward and saying ‘I’m feeling under pressure’, and on managers noticing signs of stress. Workers at the company’s Docklands office close to the recent bombing, for example, were approached and told that they could make a direct call to the psychologist if they needed to. Various stress management seminars offer information on relaxation techniques and time management skills. Performance management interviews which take stock of employees’ work also give indications of stress levels.

Coopers & Lybrand also belongs to an employee assistance counselling programme to which employees are referred

on a case-by-case basis, usually via their personnel manager. A working group has been set up to look at the issue of stress and last March a two-day ‘Partner Survival Clinic’ was piloted for consultancy partners. Other measures include performance management, team-building events, career counselling and a structure which is attempting to involve employees more in the decision-making process.

KPMG has likewise joined an employee assistance counselling programme.

But, unlike the others, it has opted for the more expensive 24-hour, seven-days-a-week service, and also respects confidentiality by allowing employees (roughly 10% of the workforce per year) to contact counsellors directly.

The company also offers training programmes which include relaxation and coping techniques.

Grant Thornton’s in-house training includes a course called ‘Working under Pressure’. The company has also piloted a telephone counselling service in London over the past year, the responses to which are currently being scrutinised. ‘Stress is difficult to measure, and we always need to make a financial case for the mechanisms we employ to combat it,’ according to Anna Allan, national personnel manager.

These responses show a level of corporate awareness, but none offers any far-reaching analysis of the causes of stress, so they tend towards cure rather than prevention. The problem is one of definition, given that most believe that stress in the right doses is not negative in itself.

David Westcott, KPMG’s human resources partner, says: ‘One needs to separate out the context of pressure – what the environment imposes on an individual – and distress, the reaction to it.’

According to Jeremy Franks, PW’s senior human resources manager, ‘many people thrive under a great deal of stress and never have a problem, whereas others crumble’. He adds: ‘I can’t say: “This is what the firm believes the stress tolerance level should be” because the line is drawn at different points for different people.’

The difficulty of pinpointing exact levels of stress makes it equally difficult to quantify which are due to employee temperament or lifestyle or, conversely, what responsibility lies with the corporation. Not surprisingly, the attitude of many companies oscillates between accepting stress as part of a hard but rewarding job, and tacitly acknowledging that certain amounts of stress might be avoided if the right management structures and attitudes were in place.

For example, on the one hand, Franks believes that ‘people have to be able to tolerate some stress in our company’. On the other, he admits that ‘stress is something we need to take seriously. We do put our people under a tremendous amount of pressure, which largely emanates from the demands of our clients’.

Franks says that PW is trying to change its ethos to one of ‘working smarter not harder’ with ‘quality rather than quantity of output’ being emphasised, along with ‘changes in our culture that make relationships at work more fruitful’.

While accepting that ‘sending them off to someone to chat to is not going to solve everything’, he does not believe that changes in the current business environment have necessarily bad for employees. It is not so much that people are working any harder than they did ten years ago, Franks says, but simply that they are more willing to talk about stress.

Malcolm Tulloch, Coopers’ management and career development manager, takes a similarly philosophical attitude to stress, recognising it ‘is a function of working in the organisation’, which is ‘not a problem because people come to Coopers with their eyes open and know what they’re getting into’ and that ‘working long hours in a stressful situation is in the nature of the beast’.

But he admits that: ‘Around the working environment, there is a lot of career uncertainty, and the flattening of the hierarchy is quite stressful because people find change unsettling. We’re also in an increasingly competitive market and people put pressure on themselves to perform.’

Finding an answer

KPMG is going a step further in its analysis by attempting to find out what causes stress within the company. Over the past few months, the company has become part of a research programme set up by Umist entitled, ‘Coping with Change’ which is being piloted at the company’s north-west offices.

Researchers are conducting ‘focus’ discussion groups at every level of the company to try to ascertain what are labelled ‘occupational stress indicators’. ‘We are asking, “What is endemic to our organisation which causes stress? What can we do organisationally to allow people to operate more effectively?”,’ KPMG’s Westcott explains.

‘Unfortunately, there is a lot of talk and conjecture about causes of stress,’ he adds. ‘Some say it is caused by long hours. Others say, “I joined the firm knowing I had to work long hours and that’s fine as long as I get the right rewards and recognition”. But my personal view is that in general too many people work too long hours. Demands are ten times what they were and we need to find a way out.’

Caron Lipman is a freelance journalist.