Michael CartyProgrammes to reduce workplace stress can help contribute to the bottom line. This is according to a recent study from Unilever, highlighted by Elaine Cohen in her guest blog post on XpertHR Employment Intelligence.
According to Cohen:
Investment in employee well-being delivers big returns. In a recent study by Unilever, employee well-being programs covering managing stress and improving nutrition and exercise delivered a return of $6.59 on every $1.64 invested.
Further details of the Unilever study can be found in an article from Australian HR website HR Leader, to which Cohen links in her post.
Many UK employers are upping their efforts to manage workplace stress. The recession provoked a sharp rise in workplace stress, but UK employers are increasing their efforts to deal with this trend, according to 2010 XpertHR benchmarking research on stress management.
For those looking to tackle stress levels in their organisation, XpertHR offers a range of resources on what to do, including the following:
- An essential XpertHR resource pack on managing absence, sickness and stress (subscription required to access content).
- The XpertHR conference on managing absence, sickness and stress – which takes place in London this Wednesday (22 September 2010) – is a one-day event aimed at any HR professional tasked with reducing absence rates and bringing employees on sick-leave back into productive work.
Stress management is an issue whose significance is not fully appreciated. In addition to its negative effect on workplace performance as noted here, stress can do serious damage to an employee’s personal life, not to mention his/her health. Employers should pay more attention to it than they do.
Harris Silverman
http://www.HarrisSilverman.com
I fully agree that stress management is not adequately addressed in the workplace. Indeed, many of the working patterns we see could have been designed to maximise stress in employees. In terms of the cost, one of the possible outcomes of unmanaged stress is clinical depression. In a 1999 book, psychologist cited the cost to the US economy of depression as being $50 billion! It is clearly both an economic and a humane issue to manage stress.