TIME RELATED JOB STRESS CAUSED BY (NEW) MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES AND HOW TO FIGHT IT

(The paper for the workshop is also available at the internet.)

Ailko van der Veen   Gisela Dütting

1. Introduction

1. exchange information on time related job stress and compare experiences across Europe
2. to deepen our understanding of time related job stress, especially how and why
3. to discuss collective strategies to fight time related job stress

This report has been compiled by the facilitators and is both a report of the outcomes as they were written down in the workshop, as well as the facilitators' own conclusions and reflections on the workshop. This report has been distributed among all participants of the workshop. Further dissemination is encouraged.

Participants came from Austria (1x), Denmark (2x), England (6x), Germany (2x), the Netherlands (3x), and Norway (1x). There were no participants from Southern Europe. One explanation put forward in the workshop was that in countries like Italy and Spain, stress is more connected with fear for life and health and not so much connected with time-constraints.

Out of the 15 participants, six were women (and this was very disproportionate, as the total conference had about 70% men). Most people in the workshop were wage earning. Most of them worked in the private sector.

2. Starting Exercise: How do you personally deal with stress?

• Agree with our tenants how rubbish our service is
• Complain about management how thick they are
• Freizeitaktivitäten für Mitarbeiter (leisure activities for co-workers)
• Get up and walk out for ½hour
• I write to do lists to see where I am and to define priorities
• Mitarbeiterforum (co-workers forum)
• Negotiate with colleagues
• Seek out a small number of friends to socialise with
• Slam doors
• Smoke more
• Spend hours-answering e-mail when I should be doing other things
• Take the phone off the hook
• Talk to trade union colleagues for advice
• Try to plan my work ahead
• Visit doctor
• Walk away
• Work too hard to overcompensate

• Angry
• Attempt to prioritise…! (Become more difficult as we lose control of our own working practise + can make fewer of our own decisions)
• Close my eyes for 10 minutes to work out my stress and get everything in reasonable order in my head
• Druk werk wordt soms werkdruk.(pressurised work becomes work stress sometimes)
• Earlier: planning of challenging jobs (which lead me straight into the red zone) Now: say no to new "challenges"
• Get ill
• Get regular sleep
• Go for a walk away from the stressful environment - fresh air helps
• I do not tell my boss too much so I can have my personal breaks
• I go and talk to colleagues and my boss (who I have a very good relationship to)
• I make plans and deadlines
• I telephone to friends in the evening
• I try to stop working in the evenings and Saturdays
• Nooit op laten jagen om werk op tijd klaar te krijgen. (never let yourself be chased to finish work in time)
• Op tijd je pauzes nemen! (take your breaks in time!)
• Opkomen voor jezelf! (speak up for yourself)
• Probleem is wanneer merk je dat de werkdruk te hoog wordt? Gesprek aangaan met werkgever en voor jezelf uitmaken dat het zo niet door kan gaan en daarover praten. (The problem is: when do you notice that work pressure is too high? Discuss with employer and decide for yourself that it cannot continue and talk about it)
• Read books & eat chocolate
• Speak to friends
• Switch off completely during the weekend and during holidays
• Take 5 minutes out with friends
• Take the dog for a walk
• Talk through stress/problem with my branch secretary
• Try to work myself out of it

• I have quit my job and started working on a free-lance basis. I have learned now how much pressure I can handle. Planning "easy days" after "busy days" is my strategy now. The basis of staying in the green zone is: I know what is important in my life and how work relates to other important parts of life, like children, my wife, friends, football-team, neighbours, piano and even the European Network.

1. There were 17 notes in the red zone, 24 notes in the yellow zone and 1 in the green zone (and this turned out to be a mistake later). People in the workshop were convinced of the problem and the priority of time related job stress. Most people mentioned during the introduction that they put themselves in the yellow zone, but would put most of their colleagues in the red zone
2. What people do to combat stress at work is most often an individual strategy. Of the 41 notes in the yellow and red zone, only eight mentioned sharing with colleagues, trade union or employer and four mentioned talking to friends (which could be on the job or outside).

3. The Discussion Paper

For the workshop, the facilitators wrote a discussion paper titled 'Time related job stress caused by new management techniques and how to fight it'. This paper was distributed to all participants in the workshop. This paper is available at the internet.

• Stress is often seen as a consequence of management techniques for more profit. However, several participants note that the same type of stress is present in the non-profit sectors (the public sector, non-governmental organisations). For example, someone in education observes that the change in funding which the government has introduced for all schools increases competition for schools. More pupils mean more money. The goalposts are continuously moved on what and how to teach, so teachers have less autonomy in their work and suffer more often from stress.
• In Norway and The Netherlands, people see continuous re-organisation at work. In the end, fewer people are doing the same work.
• The position of middle management is changing. In many companies, middle management has been cut out first as autonomous teams took on that management role themselves. In several companies, middle management is now re-institutionalised , as too much autonomy is not desirable for management
• New computer technology and the strive for continuous improvement also create stress. In one workplace, the telephone has to be picked up within three rings, as a standard for quality. Management can monitor this as computers register what happens
• more privatisation and outsourcing in a company can completely change the culture ; workers are then more vulnerable to increased work pressure
• In the agricultural sector, nature sets the tempo of work. You have to make hay when the sun shines. Nevertheless, stress can be very high
• Some participants mention that stress is caused by an imbalance between work and family responsibilities. Some participants have become free-lancers or have substantially reduced working hours to combine work and family/free time in a responsible way. Two participants mention also that travel to and from work ads substantially to stress. Some people want a local job to eliminate the problem but that is not always possible.
• One participant mentions that there is now more work that does not have a tangible outcome but is more co-ordination. This type of work leads to stress as there is no ending
• The group discussed whether fear of job loss is a real factor in accepting stress at work without complaints. For some, unemployment is a realistic factor, others notice that fear for job loss seems to function almost independently from the job market: also well trained IT specialists, who can easily get a job at the moment, are still afraid to loose their job.
• One participant mentions that people are their own worst enemies, as they will sometimes even refuse to accept that they are overworked, until it is too late. These people then influence the culture and atmosphere at work, also for others. Other participants disagree, as this would be a typical case of blaming the victim. Obviously, there must be more to enhance such behaviour. One participant describes how she feels a high degree of stress, as a combination of paid and unpaid work. The social structures and culture outside the workplace and expectations installed in us, push on performance and intensify the experienced level of stress
• One person describes how she has to handle conflicting interests in her job. She knows that she has too much work pressure and that this might endanger her health. At the same time, she feels responsible for finalising a project, so she will work long hours. Others recognise these conflicting interests and they relate it to a combination of very real job requirements (deadlines etc) and the influence of culture and psychological pressure from inside and outside the work place. This spurs a long talk about responsibility. Entrepreneurial tasks have shifted to all workers, often in teams. There is acceleration and you always have the feeling that you are not doing enough. Several participants have observed that the standards are somehow vague and it is unclear what is acceptable at work and what is not. In many companies, entrepreneurial tasks have been shifted to units or departments within the company. A unit that is not successful in the competition with other units in the company, faces the risk of disinvestment, with all its negative consequences for workers in that unit. These examples show that competition is moved closer to ordinary workers, and it is no longer a matter of being a profitable company only. This shift enhances stress for all workers, especially as there is more peer-to-peer pressure.
• Most people experienced a sense of fast changes and a feeling that anything can happen at work. No one feels secure anymore. All seems to be 'the market', portrayed as a undefined, elusive entity
• Often these general feelings of loss of control have a very real basis. One participant describes how he is in constant fear of loosing his pension now that he is approaching pension-age. If he is fired now, he will loose benefits.
• There is a difference of opinion on the usefulness of legislation, when it comes to decreasing job pressure and stress. Some say that tools can be developed to measure stress and that proper legislation can reduce it. Someone remarks 'laws do not protect people from themselves'. The group agrees that stress is something many people suffer from but all on their own. Most workers try to solve the problems by taking individual measures, either outside their work ('take the dog for a walk') or inside their job ('try to plan work ahead'). Very few people discuss their problems with each other at work. Breaking the isolation thus becomes one of the first steps that are needed

4. Group discussions

• Job insecurity
• Not knowing how to change things or not feeling empowered to do so
• Seen as a sign of weakness to complain
• Not recognising stress
• Too many different factions/unions?
• Some workplaces not 'unionised' or unused to collective bargaining
• Employee encouraged by employer to see stress as his own problem, e.g. he has managed time badly
• Performance-related pay
• Loyalty
• Moral blackmail
• How to define stress, individual perceptions differ
• Last in, worst off.

• Employee responsibility
• Money
• Fear
• Manager/worker at the same time difficult to determine interest
• Job insecurity
• Unemployment
• Standard not clear
• Image
• Legal job enforcement for unemployed
• People stay in jobs or loose it and become unemployed

• Strength in numbers: band together to fight it
• Realise that it is a management or organisational problem not an individual one
• Differentiate between company interests + individual employee interests. "My time is not the company's time".
• Changing behaviours
• Being able to say "No", or prioritise
• In the longer term, changing the climate of the workplace so that the employee is no longer just the implement of the company but work to enhance their life
• Risk asses for stress
• Legislation! Change the world
• Never try to fight it alone
• Talk about it and find help
• Deal with it on a political level e.g. through your union

• Parliamentary laws
• Independent body-monitor employers
• Get people to say no!
• Different industries - require different ways to monitor stress
• Standard of work should not be set according to performance by top 5% etc.
• Guilt of unspecified expectations
• Break isolation - by talking
• Having a strong union
• Kill off all the richest people in the world
• Challenge economic system
• Unions working throughout the world
• Focus less on economics and more on human values - get a balance
• Radical individualism
• Share success stories
• Have a voice in management
• Challenge management

In the workshops, many personal histories and experiences were exchanged. Both in the workshops and in the discussion following the reading of both groups' flipcharts, the following points were further elaborated:

1. Many workers experience a continuous but often undefined fear. It is fear of fast changes, fear of loosing your job, fear of failure as it is no longer so clear what exactly is expected of you. This fear is often experienced as a vague background but its basis can be very real. 'Only the paranoid survive' said one participant
2. One of the major barriers to changing time related job stress is that everyone experiences the problem as an individual problem. No one knows what an acceptable level of work stress really is. Those workers who do try to manage are very influential in setting a company's culture and thus adding to the stress of colleagues. Especially in team work, this becomes a type of moral blackmail, as some people in a team work very hard and the rest feels they must keep up
3. What is happening in the different organisations and companies can only be understood from a wider perspective. Participants made links to the way that unemployed people are now forced to accept any job, thus enhancing competition between workers and building more stress. All participants saw the need to challenge the current economic system, although they differed in their thinking on strategy (from legislation, building stronger unions, very concrete measures at company levels etc). All agreed that the currently the balance between economics and human values is tipped far too much in favour of economics.

Conclusions/recommendations

• The EWHNetwork must exchange internationally methods of risk assessment on stress, which involve people at the workplace
• Breaking the isolation is a priority. Works councils, trade union groups and others must
  work together and do consciousness raising on stress.
• Organising people
• Create knowledge that can be used by people at shop-floor
• Challenge the economic logic. Do it internationally. To be done by Trade Unions. Unions to involve members, discuss the economic system & workers not to compete among themselves.
• Have discussions in (multinational) companies bringing the international experience & strategies together at shop floor level.
• Make a poster on stress (as EWHN network)
• Quality of work & work standards to be organised around individual standards and not the top 5% only
• Unions to educate/build a joint critique of the international economic system & work on strategies to stop / change corporate system and educate consumers
• EWHNetwork to work globally and locally