In a return to her series on stress management, consultant and HR Zone member Annie Lawler looks at how senior management can affect stress in the workplace.

In my previous article, an observation raised by an HR Zone member was that it is the behaviour of management that causes workplace stress and that it could be eradicated if management were more inclusive in their organisations.

I have much sympathy for this point of view, in some respects, because current management culture often seems to concentrate largely on process and generally ignores the human element of their workforce other than to see “where savings can be made”, i.e. redundancies.

Whilst I’m an advocate of systems, processes, organisational and technological change, and fully understand the reason for their necessity, there has to be a balance between automation and human input and I believe the lack of recognition of employees as being ‘mere mortals’ as opposed to superhumans is certainly at the heart of many occupational health issues.

Many shareholders and managers are simply missing the point that if you have a motivated workforce who feel valued and believe they’re making a real contribution, massive improvements can be made to productivity and performance.

Taking personal responsibility

Having said that, I challenge the idea that any other person’s behaviour actually causes someone else’s stress and this is an area I cover in my seminars and in my one-to-one sessions with my corporate and private clients.

To believe that someone else can cause our discomfort or distress is symptomatic of a lot of current thinking, where people are encouraged to pass responsibility onto others for just about anything.

But at the end of the day, even when perceived bad things happen to us, we still have a choice in how we deal with them and there are plenty of people around who are examples of whether they have decided to be flattened by events and choose to become bitter and twisted, or those who choose to learn from their experiences and, despite their hurt, move forward positively.

Whatever happens to us, this is a choice that only each of us, as individuals, can make and therefore to attribute our ‘bad fortune’ to others is misguided and only adds to the feeling that many have these days of feeling powerless and lacking in control of their own lives.

What is required is for us to be aware of what triggers a stressed response from us and, by raising awareness, we can then choose how we react to and deal with the situation.

Reclaiming individual control for the collective good

From management’s point of view, however, this is NOT an opportunity to wash their hands of responsibility either. Their role in an organisation is to provide an environment which encourages the best from their employees and play to their individual strengths, for the benefit of everyone concerned.

Whilst so-called ‘soft skills’ are often dissed as being for the faint-hearted, there are many examples of organisations that have embraced an inclusive culture between management and staff and have seen huge improvements to the bottom line in the process.

The sooner, therefore, we transform the ‘us and them’ culture into methods that encourage co-operation throughout companies as a whole team, and where each individual is valued and included, the less often stress management experts such as myself will be called upon to restore harmony to troubled organisations.

And this means all elements of the equation. At present, we often think of the ‘us’ as the workforce and ‘them’ as management, but the same applies from the other perspective and neither is particularly helpful.

To use an analogy, the Queen Bee still needs the workers and the drones and vice versa and the only way they survive is by working together – one without the other fails.

Inviting your views

We would like you to be able to share your views and opinions with us. In this way, we can better develop products, ideas and services which will serve HR Zone members and organisations in general.

You are therefore invited to take part in the Breathing Space for Business survey on Stress Management in the Workplace. This survey is offered to all visitors to the Breathing Space for Business website, but we want to separate HR Zone members’ responses so that we can prepare a meaningful report, based on your responses, and report back to you.

Therefore, when you access the survey at www.breathingspaceforbusiness.com and click on ‘Corporate Survey on Stress in the Workplace’ at the bottom of the home page, you’ll notice that there is an opportunity to identify yourself as an HR Zone member at the bottom of the questionnaire.

All HR Zone respondents who complete the survey by 14th September 2007 will receive a complementary report of the results.