A friend of mine got a degree from a top-flight business school and took a job at one of those Fortune 500 companies where “full-time” means a minimum of 60 hours a week. At first she loved the pace, the travel, the nicely padded expense account, and the employee gym where she and her colleagues were actually encouraged to brainstorm Big Ideas on the cardio equipment. But as the economy started to tank and one wave of voluntary buy-outs was followed by successive waves of not-so-voluntary ones, the extra workload made it hard to keep her dates with the elliptical machine, or increasingly, to leave her desk for lunch. The manager who hired her was let go and replaced by another prone to yelling in the hallways, and not long after her dentist recommended a mouth guard to protect her molars from the teeth-grinding habit she took up at night. During a particularly stressful deadline crunch, her eczema flared up for the first time in years, an embarrassment she felt all the more keenly when she was called to a meeting with human resources and shown the details of her severance package.
The good news–her eczema went away. The bad news–so did her health insurance.
This recession seems intent on reminding us to take stock of a great many things, not the least of which may be the very delicate balance between what we do and how we feel. Work can offer so many ingredients essential to good health—a steady pay check, access to health coverage, and the sense of purpose and meaning that research says is essential to living a long, happy life. Yet, as the quaking economy has fueled everything from “survivor’s guilt” and “recession depression,” to a sudden surge in sleeping disorders, it’s clear that having a job in this economy is no guarantee that you’re actually feeling good.
“Stress affects every cell in the human body, and while there are certainly other sources of stress in our lives, work-related stress is huge,” explains Mary Jo Kreitzer, founder and director of the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. “Chronic stress can have such long-term negative effects that take a toll on employees and can be a huge drain on an organization, not only in terms of productivity, but also creativity.”
In fact, estimates suggest that unmanaged work-related stress costs this country more than $200 billion a year as a result of missed days, health and mental health issues, and lost productivity—so much so that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has ranked “neurotic reaction to stress” as the fourth most debilitating labor-related injury. “I’m often surprised at how many of us think that what goes on our in our emotional world is somehow separate from our bodies’ response—but I think that’s beginning to change,” says Michelle Duffy, professor of human resources and industrial relations at the U of M’s Carlson School of Management. An expert on anti-social workplace behavior, Duffy says the damage done by bullying, sabotage, and other undermining behavior adds another $24 billion to the total bill.
Monday mornings have long been the most popular time of the week for a heart attack—a trend that requires no explanation for anyone who has felt the gathering dread of a Sunday night. But a growing body of research suggests it’s the accumulation of those manic Mondays that really raise our health risks over time. Working in a field where the cost of failure is high—air traffic control, for instance—has been shown to trigger a cascade of stress hormones that can increase blood pressure, boost the likelihood for bad behavior (like skipping exercise, or eating out of the vending machine) and actually accelerate the aging process. In fact, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic, who’ve pioneered the notion of chronological versus biological age, estimate that American presidents age the equivalent of two biological years for every one they spend in the White House—which helps explain the touch of gray we noticed on Obama almost the moment he stepped into office.
Though some job sectors have undergone seismic shifts since the downturn (car-makers, bankers, and the media all come to mind), a Swedish study released last year confirmed that a major source of workplace stress is present even in the most stable office environment, from Dunder Mifflin on down—the incompetent boss. In fact, a study published in Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that workers who had a boss they thought of as inconsiderate, arbitrary and unjust were more likely to experience angina or heart attacks than those who worked for bosses they perceived as fair, good communicators, and capable of giving useful feedback. Worse, the cardiac risk seemed to go up the longer the employee stayed in the job.
Early retirement may not be the cure. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, recently compared hypertension rates among retirees and found that men who had been managers had lower rates of hypertension in retirement, while those were managed at work had higher rates. The highest rates of hypertension corresponded with those who had the lowest status jobs, and the smallest role in making decisions.
While most water-cooler crowds could draw some easy conclusions about why bosses are having fun in their golden years while the bossed are still fuming, new research about workplace bullying further complicates the picture. A 2008 Zogby poll found that more than half of American workers say they have suffered or witnessed workplace bullying (a definition that included sabotage, verbal abuse, undermining behavior and abuse of power). Surprisingly, 40 percent of those bullies were women, who were more than 70 percent likely to bully another female.
And while programs like The Office and 30 Rock would suggest it’s the devious malcontents on the periphery of the office power structure who cause the most damage (Dwight and Frank, respectively), Duffy and her colleagues recently examined undermining behavior in organizational settings and found just the opposite. “I had thought it would be the people on the outskirts who were doing the most undermining, but in fact it was the highest performers, the people who had the most contact with their peers, who were the most likely to be undermining their competitors,” says Duffy, who notes that this is not the first time research has suggested workplace politics mirror that of high school.
The good news about this bad news in the economy, says Kreitzer, is that more workers are tuning into the ways their work environments may not be healthy, and are taking steps to change it. “I’ve certainly heard from people that have realized they’ve stayed on the job longer than was healthy because the job provided health insurance,” says Kreitzer, who says her center’s classes on mindfulness and reducing stress have been particularly popular during this downturn. “And I’ve certainly heard from people who say losing the job was the best and worst thing that ever happened to them because it forced to do something that was closer to their hearts, to do what they really wanted to do.”
In my friend’s case, she started her own business several months ago with the remains of her severance package, and has already hired two part-time employees. While she can’t yet offer them health insurance, she figures that treating them with consideration, encouraging them to eat lunch, and letting them cut out early could also be the start of a very nice benefits package.
Work Stress Stats
Employees who think workers have more stress on the job than they did a generation ago: 3 in 4.
Percentage of job turnover rate attributed to stress: 40.
Workers who say they feel stressed on the job: 8 in 10.
Of those workers, number who say they could use some help managing stress: 1 in 2.
Percentage who say their coworkers could use the same: 42
Percentage of workers who says they’ve felt like screaming on the job because of stress: 25.
Percentage of workers who say they felt like hitting a colleague in the last year but didn’t: 14 percent.
Source: The American Institute of Stress
Written for Mpls/St. Paul Magazine, September 2009