Pressure in the working place is common and any type of job can have stressful elements and moments such as the pressure to meet the deadlines or accomplish challenging obligations in the short-term but if it becomes chronical, can be harmful both physically and emotionally for the employee. Therefore, as worker spend much of their day at work, so addressing the impact of the physical and psychosocial work environment on the health and well-being of employees is critical. According to Yerkes-Dodson’s law, when a worker is stimulated and tension is created, his/her performance in a specific task increases. As this tension increases, performance continues to increase until optimal functioning is achieved, but if too much tension is created, stress is created and productivity drops, creating negative impact with negative consequences for worker’s performance, life and environment.
Furthermore, recent studies such as the one conducted at Towers Watson showed how the company with those employees experiencing high levels of stress, more than half (57%) reported that they were being unproductive, but of the employees under low stress only one in ten (10%) had low levels of productivity and half had high commitment and productivity. Other findings in this research were that attendance was impaired by stress, with highly stressed employees averaging 4.6 days of illness per year, compared to 2.6 days for low-stress employees.
Therefore, there are factors and elements that increase the stress in the employees, such as the following:
- The excessive workloads
- Low salaries
- Few or non-existent opportunities for growth
- Not engaging or challenging work
- Conflict/unclear performance expectations and lack of control over job-related decisions
- Mismatch between the personal values and those of the organization
It is important to learn to manage the stress and look for a healthy working space because over time, the chronic work stress can turn into a psychological syndrome like the burnout, which brings signs like sense of inefficiency, cynicism and overwhelming exhaustion. Furthermore, considering these factors, it is essential and necessary to improve aspects such as:
- Encouraging and enabling workers to use their skills for business purposes.
- The tasks must be achievable, comparable with the capacity and ability of workers to go according to the skills and resources of workers.
- Specific and well-defined tasks and objectives must be set.
- Assessing employee participation in company decisions.
- Encourage relationships outside the company such as dinners or excursions.
In conclusion, the stress is not a good ally to the companies because it could lead to negative and undesired outcomes. Therefore, many important companies are working to decrease the level of stress of their workers and increase the efficient performance by building a healthy proper balanced lifestyle between the working responsibilities and familiar and social lives of their employees