Workplace stress can hurt an organization’s bottom line
Stress for Success
December 5, 2006

As an employer, whatever decreases staff turnover would positively affect your bottom line, right? Well, consider this:
• 40% of all job turnover is due to stress!

This is huge, especially when you consider the looming employee shortage due to millions of Baby Boomers retiring and so many fewer Gen Xers to take their place.

Companies that weigh the consequences of not addressing worker well-being compared to the payoff of doing so are included in Robert Levering’s book, “The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America.” They have more than twice the earnings per share and more than twice the rate of stock appreciation as the average Standard & Poor’s 500 company.

To help you reduce employee turnover, here is general information about workplace stress. To reduce your specific problems you’ll need to get accurate information from your employees.

Stress leads to an increase in accidents as well as to illness and disease, therefore higher health care costs. When stressed your attention narrows, you become preoccupied, which leads to more injuries.
• Jonathan Torres, M.D., of Workmed Occupational Health Services, ME: workers with high stress are 30% more likely to have accidents than those with low stress. Sixty to 80% of on-the-job accidents are attributed to stress!
• Harvard Business Review reported on average, stress-related accident claims are two times more costly than nonstressed related ones.
• A study of 3,020 aircraft employees: those who “hardly ever” enjoy their jobs were 2½ times more likely to report back injury.

Stress also creates “tunnel vision”, which can cause errors of judgment decreasing creativity and the ability to cope with change. When stressed, humans revert back to familiar behaviors, not something that allows us to adapt in today’s environment of never-ending organizational change.

Other workplace problems created by or at least exacerbated by stress include:
• Interpersonal conflict: the St. Paul Insurance report found the main causes of burnout were interpersonal demands from working with teams and supervisors.
• Violence accounts for 17% of all deaths in the workplace according to a Northwestern National Life study.
• Customer service problems: stressed-out and tired employees don’t treat your customers well enough.
- A Harvard Business Review study by Reichheld & Sasser found a 5% reduction in customer defection translates into a 30% - 85% increase in corporate profitability.
• Loss of intellectual capital: to thrive organizations must be perceptive, agile and responsive to market and customer needs. Stressed-out employees don’t focus on excellence and innovation.
- Jack Quirk of Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Maine: “Organization’s ability to make process improvements nearly always stops due to resistance. With overwhelming workloads … and going so fast, (employees) don’t have time to make the process better. It creates a terrible cycle of trying to work harder … because the volume you have to put out is increasing, but you aren’t doing anything to make the process more effective and efficient.”
- High-stress jobs with low control cause employees thought processes to become more rigid, simplistic and superficial, not a great mindset for innovation.
- Dr. Martin Seligman’s (University of Pennsylvania) research on “learned helplessness” has shown that the more helpless a person feels, the less likely she is to come up with effective coping responses.

For a happier, healthier workforce:
• How can you identify and relieve your employees’ main stressors?
• What can you do to give them more control, therefore less stress, over their day-to-day activities?
• How can you help your employees enjoy their jobs more?

Your answers – and more importantly your actions – that reduce their stress will improve your bottom line.

Jacquelyn Ferguson, M. S., of InterAction Associates, is a trainer and a Stress Coach. E-mail her at www.jackieferguson.com or call 239-693-8111 for information about her workshops on this and other topics or to invite her to speak to your organization.