Sabre toothed Stress at work!

BBC Radio Solent’s Jon Cuthill, Tuesday 7th April, 2009

Senior Clinical Psychologist and QoWL Ltd Director, Simon Easton was interviewed on Jon Cuthill's BBC Radio Solent show where Simon chatted to Jon about stress at work on the 'most stressful day of the year'. Simon explained how people can improve their awareness and management of any stress they experienced at work to help them perform to the best of their abilities. Simon said that stress was probably a good response in the mists of time when faced with a sabre-toothed tiger, but not as useful when faced with a difficult meeting at work. Jon Cuthill concluded by saying his manager was a bit like that and exhorting everyone to watch out for sabre-toothed tigers at work!

Do you love open plan offices?

Do you work in an open plan office – do you find them fun, stimulating and more dynamic, or are they irritating, noisy and even unhygienic?

Love them or hate them, open plan offices are probably here to stay. Organisations find them cheaper to run, more flexible when reorganising space, find that they increase communication between workers and that more people can fit in the same space.

A recent systematic review of the research concerned with open plan offices found that despite the many good aspects of open plan layouts for organisations, many people who worked in open plan offices were unhappy with their working environments. High levels of noise and distraction can easily lead to loss of concentration with consequences for productivity job dissatisfaction and irritation levels. More abstractly, but no less importantly people associated open offices with loss of privacy, feelings of insecurity and lack of status; if only the boss has a closed office how does that make you feel?

Perhaps more seriously open plan offices were found to be related to higher levels of reported stress, more communicable sicknesses such as flu, increased fatigue and increased blood pressure levels. Also worryingly they can actually lead to greater costs because of increased staff turnover.

Like much psychological research, if you wonder whether your office might be badly affected when going over to an open plan office, the answer is “it depends”, the answer being influenced by a complex interaction between your personality, the type of tasks you have to do and the organisation’s attitude and flexibility in using such workspaces.

At QoWL we analyse comments from thousands of office workers, and open plan offices are often singled out for criticism which includes many of the issues described above. It seems however, if the task employees need to complete requires a high level of social interaction and is facilitated by a high level of easy communication: "Hey, Bob someone here wants to know what grade we got on that big review?" then open plan offices are generally very good. However, if a job is characterised by periods of intense concentration, especially when personally or commercially sensitive information is being used, a more private office space works best.

Indeed, some people love open-plan offices with all their attendant problems, as where else can you catch up with gossip, pass round sweeties and work all at the same time!


Reference

Oommen, V. G., Knowles, M., Zhao, I. (2008). Should health service managers embrace open plan work environments? A review. Asia Pacific Journal of Health Management. 3 (2),37-43.

Commuting Stress?

Almost whenever we get to chat to representatives of a client organisation we can guarantee that the issues that will get the most moans and groans from everyone in the room are 'parking' or 'travelling to work'.

When examined across all our data sets parking and travelling to work seem to have little effect on the average experience of quality of working life. However when we look at individuals these issues can have a major impact.

In almost all of our surveys where people are able to comment in an open question, parking or commuting comments are in the top 10 most mentioned issues and if the overall impression is negative, people's comments often show they are hopping mad about it!

Why should people be particularly upset about such peripheral aspects of a job?

Well, there are a number of reasons, but the best explanation appears to be related to the idea first suggested by Herzberg that there are certain elements of job satisfaction called Hygiene factors where the minimum level you expect is for them to be good. Such Hygiene factors are usually to do with access to the basic resources you need to do your job. For an office worker this might be having the email system up and working, but even extends to whether you are allowed to make personal phone calls at work. Perhaps counter-intuitively having such factors at a better than average level does not seem to improve QoWL by very much, but having them at a less than average level seriously reduces QoWL!

In addition to building more car parks and improving the roads generally, there are many ways organisations and individuals attempt to overcome problems with Parking & Commuting.

Flexi-time is a time honoured method for staggering travel and parking times, quite often commuting just one hour later or earlier can make all the difference. Allowing staff to stagger their start and end times can also have good effects on general home-work interface issues as well, such as not having to rush to drop the kids off at the start of the day.

Car pooling or car sharing potentially helps both travel times and parking issues, but can be frustrating and cause a perceived loss of control if someone wants to leave early and the other person does not!

If you really cannot change anything practically it might be that thinking about the problem in a different way, perhaps by trying to see the advantages of the situation (e.g. Getting fit by having to walk the last half a mile to work). Tony Cassidy has talked about this and other psychological approaches to dealing with commuting-related stress.

Finally, one of the reasons people feel free to voice a negative opinion about issues such as parking or travelling to work is that they are a shared gripe, and they won't be embarrassed moaning about it even to the big boss.



Selected Research Articles

Herzberg, F. (1966). Work and the Nature of Man. Cleveland: World Press. 4 (2) 15-21.

Cassidy, T.(1992). Commuting-related Stress: Consequences and ImplicationsA scale for measuring email overload. Employee Counselling Today. 4 (2) 15-21.

QoWL Top Tips: how to Reduce Email Overload

One of the small pleasures of office life is to be able to show off about the number of emails you have received whilst you are away – “…away for a week and I had 200 emails waiting for me when I got back!”. However, sometimes the drip-drip-drip of emails in your inbox can be cause for concern, stress or even downright panic.

Increasingly organisations assessing the quality of working life, well-being or stress of their staff are concerned about ‘email overload’. Research evidence and our experience of supporting staff have shown that there are some general strategies that can be effective when people are trying to cope with the demands of too many emails. Putting these together we have come up with (as tradition dictates) 10 top tips for improving your quality of working life by reducing email overload.

1. Get a good junk mail filter
A large percentage of emails dropping in your inbox will be junk – offers from an African General to transfer a million dollars into your account, your bank asking you for your account details & password as they have forgotten them, or even offers for cheap blue tablets to improve your performance. Although this type of email is easily deleted and discarded, if you have too many it can just add to the feeling of being overwhelmed. Get a good junk mail filter – and learn how to use the software so you can ignore emails from persistent offenders.

2. Cancel your email subscriptions
You might not notice them anymore because you delete them straight away, but all those emails from sign-up & subscription services and organisations who send you periodic newsletters all add up. Pause a little the next time they turn up to think if you ever read them, and if not, cancel them.

3. Think before *you* send an email
Of course most of your emails should be top priority for their recipients, but how many times do you send emails ‘just in case they might like to know’ or where you just send people a short or irrelevant reply to be polite: ‘OK’, ‘Thanks’. Sometimes a 'No reply required' note at the end of your email can do wonders to reduce 'politeness overload' messages, especially if you have to send out general information emails to many people.

4. Don’t ‘copy’ you emails to everyone
It is tempting to give everyone a blow-by-blow account of your dealings with important or sensitive people, but not everyone will want to know and it is likely you will just add to *their* sense of email overload.

5. Only send Urgent emails when it really is urgent
We all probably know some people who send ‘red’ emails just to tell you they have entered the building. Not only does indiscriminate use of high priority emails cause a sense of overload, but can also lead to people ignoring really important messages.

6. Rude or ‘flaming’ emails
Research has shown we are more likely to come over as rude or abrupt on email compared to the telephone or face-to-face. If you are trying to deal with a sensitive topic be brave and go and see them or even pick up the phone rather than letting things escalate over email. Reading such messages in the cold light of day rarely makes anyone look reasonable.

7. Check your emails *less* often
Now, you can’t always do this and it may be counterintuitive to some extent, but looking at your emails less often (even if your email looking takes longer as you need to deal with more of them) is much less stressful than looking at your emails very often. The worst possible thing you can do for your sense of email overload and interruptions to your other work is to have an alarm set up where you get notified every time a new email comes on your system (or if you do need this, reserve it for 'red’ emails only).

8. Keep you inbox small (or large)
Trying to deal with all of your emails as they come in rather than letting them sit there looking at you can be an effective way to deal with email overload. However many emails, especially work-related need to be thought about and so cannot be dealt with straight away. A possibly counter-intuitive alternative that works for some people is to not empty your inbox at all (except for junk mail) and deal with the important ones as they come in. This helps reduce the sense of urgency, and if you forget to answer an email you can easily find it again.

9. More talk less email
You sit there fingers poised over keyboard, trying to put your thoughts in order, knowing it’s going to be a complicated one. STOP! Pick up the phone, go along to their office & talk it through. Not only should it save you time in the long run, but the interactivity means you should get any problems sorted out more thoroughly, and it generally improves everyone's quality of working life to have a chat. If you really need an email record of what you’ve just agreed, you or they can send an email summary, with ‘No reply required’ at the end of your message.

10. The view from Microsoft
If you use Outlook, have a look at Microsoft’s approach to dealing with email overload, including setting priorities and organising emails: http://office.microsoft.com/training/training.aspx?AssetID=RC100647451033

So, after your next week off, you will be the envy of the staff coffee room, being able to say, “I followed the QoWL email overload top tips, I was away for a week and I only have 100 emails waiting for me when I got back!”. Well... every little helps.


Selected Research Articles

Hogan, B. & Fisher, D. (2006). A scale for measuring email overload

Analysis of Data following Microsoft Email Overload Scale

Dabbish, L.A. & Kraut, R. E. (2006). Email Overload at Work

Flaming emails