Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong. — Ella Fitzgerald
Are you suffering from work stress? If you have a job, you probably are. It comes in many forms. Too many demands, the unspoken expectation that you will work late each night, seemingly endless promotions of people of a certain gender while other genders are overlooked. Getting left out of a lunch meeting and wondering why. As you sit through yet another team all-hands where your boss jokes with one of his drinking buddies, your mind wanders. Could there be something better?
I think there could.
Consider this: work stress is literally killing us.
A recent article, well worth reading, links 3 powerful ideas: (one) a large portion of healthcare costs come from chronic disease, (two) many such diseases are linked to stress, and (three) the biggest source of stress is the workplace.
In fact, according to that article, the 5th biggest cause of death in the United States is the workplace.
You may have heard of the the concept of an invincible career — one where you work doing something you enjoy, in a location you like, and with people who bring out the best in you. How the heck do you get from here to there? Well, in short, it’s not easy but you can do it. There’s a lot of good advice out there for making your own situation better. (I recommend Brilliant Forge, if you’re curious.) But what if we shifted perspective?
Ask not how to reduce your own stress, ask what you can do to make everyone else’s situation better.
I’m talking to you — the people who lead companies. If you have even a single person reporting to you, do the math: killing your employees, or even just making them sick, or unhappy, doesn’t make business sense. And of course, in case you didn’t know this, it’s actually evil.
This is what we don’t talk about — we are more than happy to suggest people ways that they can try to reduce their own stress. What we don’t want to hear is that making your employees happy is not about giving them pizza on Fridays.
“While we know that chronic stress is not good for employees, company wellness initiatives are not the primary way to respond to that stress. Our data suggests that while wellness initiatives can be helpful, a much bigger lever is the work itself.” (One In 5 Highly Engaged Employees Is at Risk of Burnout)
A lot of us are literally killing the people who work for us. So cut it out! In short, here are 4 ideas:
- To every extent possible, give flex time, time off, and let your people set their own hours. They are adults. Ask them to help you get the work done and figure out how to do it while still having a life.
- Pay a living wage. Share the profits, share the wealth. The winner in this world is not the person with the most money.
- Ask questions and pay attention to the answers. Ask everyone questions, not just the people you like to go out with to happy hour. Don’t have favorites at work.
- Use a transparent, fact-based approach to choose solutions to business problems. Set out the qualities that the solution needs to have, then pick the solution that has those qualities. Not the one that your favorite suggested, not the one the loudest person advocated. The one that actually works. Good for business, good for morale.
I believe work can be a huge, positive aspect of human flourishing. Let’s make it happen.