Workplace Stress

United Nations International Labor Organization describes workplace stress as a global epidemic. Studies show that out of every four workers in the United States, three describe their job as being stressful. There are passionate words used to describe workplace stress and so much seriousness comes out revealing that this kind of stress will cost more than just money when it affects your company. It is as a result of very high demand placed upon the fragile sometimes absent resources of a worker. Three words that fully describe the stress are pressure, frustration and exhaustion. There are many factors that are known to cause the stress and they come in several categories which are described below.

The first category of factors is specific work factors and they might be excessive workload, meaningless and tedious work, very long hours with very low pay, unreasonable demands for work, infrequent or no rest breaks. Each of this issues can be explored in depth to see how exactly they affect you while you work. Focussing on the long hours with low pay, you are bound to be less motivated but, since work is scarce, you continue on without having resolved your emotions and feelings. This will result in angry workers who do not have the drive to perform. Unreasonable targets or demands set upon you will see you get very frustrated and you might end up resigning from the job in bad terms.

Lack of breaks or few breaks will see any worker under perform because they do no have that escape that is suitable for any worker. An ideal work situation should not leave you feeling suffocated as if you are in a boarding school, you should enjoy ever minute of your working experience and employers should see to this. The other causes of workplace stress is physical environment and this consists of noise, poor air quality, health and safety risks and ergonomic problems. All this factors will reduce productivity significantly. The other category has to do with organizational practices which consist of the following problems. The first one is unclear expectations and responsibilities.

Also, conflicting job demands will fall under this category. Others are too many supervisors, lack of autonomy which will see you excluded in decision making. This factor plays a major role in making workers feel like their opinions do not matter. Also, if the company lacks family friendly policies, it will affect the work. Another thing that is paramount is lack of proper and efficient communication. This is probably the biggest problem facing our work situations where even with enough communication skills, the message is not accepted to improve the condition of workers. This cause workplace stress and the same squarely falls on employers. Other categories include workplace change which consists of fear of layoffs, frequent worker turnover, lack of enough technological advancements, very poor chances of promotion and many others. The final category touches on interpersonal relationships which may include distant bosses, office politics, harassment and even bullying of workers and problems as a result of time away from family.