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Learning To View Stress As A Problem for Corporations
Stress is probably the most elusive enemy in the workplace, not just because there is no single way to measure it, but because no one really knows how to reach the right balance between healthy challenges and toxic work pressure. After all, don’t employers want their staff to move mountains against all odds? How can you actually tell when stress becomes bad?
As a CEO of a wearable tech company, it is a business necessity to set challenging roadmaps for high-impact projects. We face competitive pressure every day and I often find myself thinking that “good stress”—also known as "eustress"—is needed to get things done. Most CEOs are educated to think this way. When I was a student at the MIT, professors encouraged us to study like crazy as examinations approached. Based on an article by Alice G. Walton on Forbes.com entitled Is A Little Stress A Good Thing For The Brain?, there’s new research that suggests short-lived stressors are actually good for the brain as they stimulate the production of new neurons. Why should it be different in the workplace?
As Withings began offering trackers to wellness managers aiming to reduce employee stress, I began to question my judgement, both as an employer, and as a wellness provider. With my quantified-self background, my approach to such dilemmas always starts with the same question: what does the data tell us?
The one thing we can measure is the cost of stress. According to the American Institute of Stress, stress is responsible for half of the 550 million working days lost by American workers every year. The Withings Health Institute estimates that this represents nearly $80 billion in lost productivity. The stress here is of a different nature to the one I enjoyed as a student. The Centers for Disease Control refers to it as “the harmful physical and emotional responses that occur when the requirements of the job do not match the capabilities, resources, or needs of the worker.” We know that failure to address this stress can lead to sleeplessness, anxiety, depression, irritability, muscular tension, burn-out, heart attacks and strokes.
Measuring Stress With Smart Devices
Preventing bad stress is fundamentally a management problem. But unlike chronic diseases that are hard to cure but easy to measure, the tricky part with stress is that employees never tell you there is a problem until it’s too late.
Given the stakes, Withings decided to experiment a novel approach at measuring stress, leveraging on the wealth of data generated by its community of devices owners. In a recent survey, we asked 10,000 U.S. users about their work and analyzed their answers in light of physical activity and sleep levels. As it turned out, employees’ perception of stress is clearly correlated to measurable health outcomes.
People who feel stressed by their jobs sleep 20 minutes less in average than others . Research shows that lack of sleep increases the likeliness of attention deficits, cognitive impairment, work injuries, and, in the end, productivity loss. 60% of stressed employees gain weight on starting a new job, against 40% for others . They also have higher heart rates and are in more excess weight.
Targeting Stress With Smart Data
The good news is that stress is something you can fight by adopting healthier lifestyles. But we first need to understand how work-life causes us to stress out.
Employees react differently to heavy workload, changes in the organization, bad management, poor relations, under or over-qualification. But it’s not all personal. Stress may actually depend on your occupation, with buyers and retail managers among the most stressed out jobs, as Withings data shows. This data also destroys a common myth, according to which the higher one stands in an organization, the more stressful his or her job is. Top executives are only slightly more stressed than the average, and way less than HR managers.
Stress may also depend on where you live. Withings’ studies have shown that people in Chicago or New York typically walk 10% faster than those in Oklahoma City. This is correlated to commuting time, a typical source of stress, with New Yorkers taking 20 extra minutes to get to work than those in Mid-West cities. Reorganizing how we commute to work, or reducing “face time” at work could go a long way at easing our nerves in a corporate setting.
Making Moves To Beat Stress
Beating stress is first and foremost a matter of managerial prevention, if not prediction. Wellness managers must identify jobs at risk, shift positions when possible and adapt workload to capacities. They must offer employees tools to let the steam out.
At Withings, I have started telling employees to slow down, especially if they are in a rush. Slowing down can help improve focus on important activities and tasks. This is true about work, and is also true about nutrition. Simple ways to reduce stress are eating slowly, and limiting caffeine and alcohol consumption. These substances can amplify anxiety or irritability. Balanced diets provide more energy to cope with everyday situations.
Finally, employees need to get that blood pumping and break a little sweat. Physical activity stimulates the production of endorphins, hormones that act as a natural stress reliever by generating a sensation of well-being. Withings data shows this quite clearly: active people are significantly less affected by stress (59%) than their sedentary peers (69%) .
All in all, corporations need smart data to transform bad stress into good stress, much in the same way we need to transform bad cholesterol into good cholesterol. For employees, this is key to long-term work-life balance. For corporations, the data can make them see that slowing down often means going a longer way.
