Can workplace stress get much worse?
As a real-estate and business attorney, John R. Browne III is familiar with stress. But in his 34 years on the job, nothing has compared to what he shoulders now as the economy heads downward.
With five children's college tuition to pay and a portfolio of tanking technology stocks, the 62-year-old attorney worries every day that his retirement nest egg will crack further. His clients, anxious about their own futures, are driving harder bargains now and taking longer to pay their fees. And even the things that were supposed to make his life easier -- like e-mail and his cellphone -- have tethered him to work and usurped his private life.
"I feel more stressed than I've ever been," says Mr. Browne, who sets an alarm clock every evening in an attempt to leave the office at a reasonable hour. And he figures the more the economy slows, the worse the strain will get. "I work hard, and to see your retirement going down the drain ... it's very disconcerting."
Multiply John Browne times millions of other lawyers, doctors, sales executives, factory workers, dot-commers and anxious stockholders, and you've got a picture of stress in early 2001. Whatever their station, all have come to expect more wealth in recent years. Now with the first economic slowdown in a decade, they are facing an unsettling uncertainty. Stock portfolios are shrinking and gluttons for punishment can even constantly monitor the shrinkage online.
Meanwhile, mergers, downsizings and the ability of managers to monitor individuals' job performance add more layers of insecurity. As workers fret about layoffs, they do so knowing that with new information technology, their managers can track performance division by division, employee by employee, with startling precision.
Today's stresses, of course, pale beside the conditions of decades past, when some workers feared for their lives in dangerous factories and bleak sweatshops. Stress was a "hardy perennial in the textile mills and meatpacking yards of the 19th century, and the factories and offices of the 20th century," says Nancy Koehn, a business historian at Harvard Business School. Letters by business tycoons, commodity clerks and assembly workers in the early 20th century are filled with complaints about how "no one has time to stop and give a stranger directions, or time for family or service to community," says Ms. Koehn. "There has always been the omnipresent authority of the clock at work."
Today's stress is, in many ways, about too much information coming from too many sources -- and the loss of control that instills. A survey by Pitney Bowes of some 1,200 workers from receptionists to chief executives at top companies found that employees handle an average of 204 messages a day, counting e-mail, voice mail, snail mail and memos. And all the cool tech tools now available -- from credit-card size cellphones to wireless Palm hand-held organizers -- have in turn made us reachable anytime, anywhere.
"You never feel done," says Paul Finkle, chief operating officer of HRPath.com, an online human-resource company based in Alameda, Calif. He used to listen to music in his car driving to and from work but now talks on his cellphone with clients while he drives. And although e-mail enables him to communicate more quickly than he once did with faxes and letters, the volume of messages he sends and receives has increased his workload by 30% in the last three years, he estimates.
Mr. Browne, the attorney who heads the business, real-estate and trust department of Laughlin Falbo Levy & Moresi in San Francisco, grumbles that because his legal clients now insist that he communicate with them by e-mail, "You have to check that every five minutes." Clients also expect to be able to reach him at any hour of the night or day. "It's a blow to my privacy. It doesn't just affect me at the office, it affects my life," he says.
To be sure, some workers thrive on stress. It's the lifeblood of such professions as medicine, law and the military, where the ability to perform precisely under pressure has long been a prerequisite. Today, the young software engineers and venture capitalists who launched the Internet revolution love to boast about their 24/7 schedules.
Is there a happy medium? Some stress experts use the analogy of a violin string. Not enough pressure on the string produces a weak, raspy tone. Too much pressure can produce a shrill noise, or even cause the string to snap. But "just the right degree can create magnificent tones," says the Web site for the American Institute of Stress in Yonkers, N.Y.
The problem is, in today's workplace, many employees, like the shrill violin string, are being pulled too tightly, and in too many directions. "There is a lot more stimulation at work, which is exciting but also exhausting," says Harvard Business School's Ms. Koehn. The constraint of being stuck at one job or one company for life has given way to the freedom of job-hopping and taking charge of one's career. But even that can inspire its own insecurities. With people "getting yanked around [because of layoffs or mergers] and having to reinvent themselves ... there is less opportunity to experience a shared narrative," says Ruth J. Luban, a Santa Monica, Calif., psychotherapist who counsels layoff victims.
Such anxieties were easier to tolerate in a booming economy, when employees could count on ever-fatter pay checks, options and richer retirement portfolios, as well as new jobs if they lost or didn't like their old ones. For those who entered the work force in the last five years and have never weathered a downturn, the economic whiplash may prove particularly disquieting -- and humbling.
Not surprisingly, employees report more severe workplace stress ailments during economic slowdowns than booms. In 1998, a boom year and the most recent for which Bureau of Labor Statistics data was available, there were 53% fewer reported stress-related cases than in 1993, a time when the job market was weaker and corporate layoffs rife. Even so, stress took a toll on productivity. The median job absence for stress-related conditions was 15 days in 1998, according to the BLS. But despite numerous claims, most courts have rejected the notion that workplace stress is a disability in and of itself. As a result, employers in most cases are not legally required to make their workplaces more accommodating to stressed-out workers.
Still some are starting to add once unheard-of perks such as gyms or meditation centers, for example, where they can unwind. Sales of squeezable stress balls at Stressballs.com have doubled every year for the past three years -- due mainly to corporate purchases. A handful of employers, including Goldman Sachs, give out scented candles as freebies at job fairs in a symbolic nod to the pressures of work.
Meanwhile, some Internet companies in Silicon Valley have offered employees a paid week or two off -- unthinkable just two years ago, when round-the-clock devotion was all but mandated. With so many workers' stock options under water, "these companies can't work employees like animals any more simply by promising them that they will be rich in a few years," says H.R. Path's Mr. Finkel. "They have to focus more on their culture."
For the most part, employees are on their own when it comes to coping with stress. Attorney Mr. Browne, who feels "zonked and spaced out" when he is stressed, meditates when he gets to work at 7 a.m. and does yoga at least three times a week "or my blood pressure goes up," he says. To relax, he also dons "big flashy bow ties" and does magic tricks. "You can't think about your law cases then," he says.