There’s no doubt about it that employees, leaders, managers, and even our Zoom video conferencing systems are feeling STRESSED!  Over a year ago, we never could have predicted the state that we’d be in now; and even if we did, I wonder if we would have done anything different to prepare.  Throughout time it has become pretty obvious that as humans we typically don’t take action, especially expensive action until we have to; and by “have to”, I mean until the pain of not taking action far surpasses the pain of doing something about it.

Stress isn’t new, and while organizations have dabbled in stress management programs for decades, they haven’t become a staple of business to the degree that they deserve perhaps because the whole premise behind them is flawed and misunderstood. I’m not suggesting that addressing stress is flawed, but rather than stress is not something that was ever meant to be “managed”.

#1 Stress Was Never Meant to be “Managed”

At its roots, stress is an evolutionary process that is designed to help creatures survive, and without it, humans would have gone extinct a long time ago.  As we’ve noted in past MBM Blogs, on one hand, stress is pretty simple when defined as “the result of a person’s perceived physiological and psychological inability to cope with their current view of reality.”  Millions of years ago our ancient ancestors were confronted with various environmental threats including things like predators, dangerous weather, and tribal conflicts.  In many ways, our ancestors who possessed the most effective stress responses became the ones who coped best with those challenges and outcompeted other early humans and animals for resources.  Robust stress responses gave early peoples’ an evolutionary advantage that could be passed down to their offspring.  We are collectively the lineage of folks who were exceptionally effective at becoming stressed!  So when it comes to stress management, in truth our stress responses were designed evolutionarily to operate more like wild stallions than trust funds; one is meant to run free and the other, well…. managed.

#2 Stress Is Subconscious

If we look again at the current definition of stress, we’ll notice that it is ultimately the result of someone’s perception.  Perception is a construct of our subconscious, not conscious, mind.  Our perceptions are primarily formed in our early lives and while they can change over time, our perceptions form the foundations of how we experience reality.  No two people perceive the world the same way, so no two people will experience a potentially stressful event the same way.  What one person perceives as stressful may be thoroughly enjoyable to another.  The bottom line is that our perceptions run us, not the other way around, so the whole idea of “managing” them doesn’t make much sense.

#3 Stress Isn’t the Problem

One key difference between our ancient forbearers and modern selves is that after stress-inducing experiences our early relatives automatically did certain things to return their physiology to a state of relative balance, whereas in modern times we have tended to chronically push past our body’s warning signs and stay in stress responses longer to the point that we develop physiological and psychological imbalances, which we call disease.  In other words, modern humans with our “superior intellect” have developed the capacity to consciously override our instinctual responses for recovery following stressful experiences; much to our demise.

What most of us think of as being stressed is our body’s chronic adaptations to low and moderate-grade stressors; think tight muscles, high blood pressure, irritability, emotional volatility, fatigue, and anxiety.  Over time these continuous low and moderate grade stressors just start to feel like “life” and we keep piling on the work and responsibilities because we’ve become used to feeling terrible.  Even in modern times, if we experience a highly stressful experience like a car accident our bodies will force us to shut down and rebalance, however with lower grade stressors we build an unhealthy capacity over time to tolerate more and more stress.  Many stress management programs teach people to relax, breathe deeply, and talk about what is stressful, and while these are all of the great value if a person takes these actions and the stress responses persist then there is something deeper driving the process.

Stress is a response remember, to a perceived inability to cope with a current view of reality.  If someone is experiencing chronic stress then it must mean that they are chronically perceiving that they can’t cope with the demands of their current reality, regardless of what those demands are.  Stress isn’t the problem, stress is a symptom of the problem.  The real problem is whatever is feeding the perception of threat.  Focusing on managing stress, therefore, is akin to training the crew of the Titanic to be more efficient bailers!

If Not Now, When?

We, humans, are social beings, and therefore both need one another while at the same time often feel subconsciously threatened by one another.  Right now, our social systems and constructs are being pushed past the point where most garden variety stress management strategies are effective, even for short-term relief.  It’s time for us to shift our thinking and approach to address the source of stress where it lives, in our perceptions.  This isn’t as complicated or mysterious as it sounds, but the real question is, “Are we in enough pain now to do something different, or are going to keep trying to bail out this sinking ship the same way we always have?”

In our most recent Motivation Beyond Measure Forum we met with both forward thinking organizational leaders and outside consultants to talk about Best Practices for Measuring the Stress Levels of Employees. Coming into the forum our assumption was that leaders and consultants would want specific tools for accurately measuring the stress levels of people working in their organizations; however as often happens in our forum discussions, our participants shared some unexpected and very welcome ideas for better understanding what is going on within people’s individual stress experiences.

Alarming Stress Statistics

The awareness of organizational and employee stress has perhaps never been greater than it is right now. As we wrote about in an earlier MBM blog post, the Harvard Business Review’s current series on employee burnout has highlighted continually alarming trends, including that 89% of their survey respondents say that their work lives are getting worse and 85% report that their well-being has declined. According to a recent survey conducted by the Global Leadership Forecast, 86% of high-potential employees feel “used up” at the end of the workday. 66% of Human Resources professionals feel the same and about 44% of those leaders are considering changing companies.

Burnout: A Taboo Topic

While stress awareness seems to be at an all-time high, what may even be more distressing than the levels of reported employee stress is the apparent lack of acknowledgement or support from organizations themselves. A survey from FlexJobs and Mental Health America reports that only 21% of employees are able to have open and productive conversations about burnout with their HR departments and 56% said their HR departments did not encourage discussions on burnout. It would appear that as a whole, even if organizations recognize the ship is sinking very few leaders are willing to listen to the alarm, never mind grab a bucket and start bailing.

How to Measure Stress

When it comes to stress, measuring it can be a curious thing. On one hand, stress is pretty simple, when defined as “the result of a person’s perceived physiological and psychological inability to cope with their current view of reality.” In other words, when a person perceives that they can’t effectively respond either physically or psychologically to their current life demands, their body and brain jump into gear to help. Of course, the problem becomes that if the response isn’t effective in solving the perceived problem then the body and brain try and turn up the response higher and higher until either the problem is solved or the person burns out. Although beyond the intent of this article, there are a some very effective ways to manage stress at this level, namely by addressing a person’s perception and how it relates to their environment and reality.

On the other hand, stress is very complex considering that it is not only physiological and psychological but also emotional, behavioral, environmental, social, relational, and once again, perceptual. Stress is also strange, in that not everyone responds to the same stressful exposures in the same way; and yet work stress can be predicted based on the relationship of perceived effort vs. reward and degrees of demand vs. control. In many ways stress is as elusive as Bigfoot but also as common as the family pet.

The number of surveys, scales, and assessments for measuring stress are quite extensive, each one with a specific nuance which makes it more or less valid for any one particular situation. During our forum discussion, we introduced several scales ranging from non-validated, context specific scale surveys to our personal favorite validated measures, the Perceived Stress Scale and Motivational Mapping. Initially we were most interested in finding out more about which stress metrics leaders really wanted, however based on the discussion with forum participants our focus meaningfully turned to the most effective qualitative, rather than quantitative stress investigation methods.

Best Practices: Measuring Stress in the Workplace

For our group of participants, it was clear that they already knew high levels of people within their organizations were stressed, their question was now, “why”? This can be a tricky place for organizational leaders and managers, on one hand knowing and caring that your people are stressed and on the other hand if you ask “why”, there is a high likelihood that it will have something to do with you! This is where only the most courageous leaders are willing to go, asking the questions that not only may be a bit ego bruising but also initiate your taking actions to respond and address these newly revealed and often painful issues.

We asked our group, “What is one question you would love to ask your people, that you haven’t asked yet”? Here is a sample of a few responses:

• “What is one thing you’ve consistently done this year that has helped you manage your stress better?”
• “From a leadership perspective, do you feel like I have your back?”
• “What is one obstacle that will get in your way from having a great day today?”
• “How clear are your job requirements and responsibilities?” 

Each of these questions not only surveys a person’s own stress experience but also offers an opportunity for empowerment in self-expression and advocacy. It’s also worth suggesting that any one of these questions asked to several people will begin to give a more detailed picture of the cultural threads which connect your teams and organizations together. It would seem that when it comes to measuring stress, gathering quantitative data is a necessary place to start while the qualitative understanding will ultimately drive much needed change.

People are burned out in record numbers and 89% of people say their work-life is getting worse according to a recent article by the Harvard Business Review. The impact of stress and employee mental wellness is no longer a luxury; it’s critical to our economy. So where should we start to look for a solution? You might think that the fix is in the amount of work… or the amount of hours a person works… however, burnout is not a logistics issue. Burnout is an emotionally based problem. 

Characteristics of Burnout

When looking into the characteristics of burnout we see clear as day that it’s an emotional issue based deeply on our physiological responses. It affects how we “feel” and the feeler, we often forget, is our body. Symptoms of burnout cited in the Harvard Business Review classic from 1981, When Executives Burn Out, include:

·     Chronic fatigue

·     Anger

·     Self-criticism

·     Cynicism

·     Irritability

·     Feeling besieged

·     Hair-trigger emotional reactions

All of the above experiences exist in our bodies. Yet so often we look outside of the body for solutions. All of the above experiences have an emotional base, but so often we avoid talking about emotions, especially at work.

Yet typical solutions to burnout simply prove ineffective as evidenced by the fact that burnout was an escalating problem before the pandemic. Why would we think that those solutions would work now when they weren’t making a sustainable dent before?

Past Solutions Are Superficial

According to the Mayo Clinic in an article titled Job Burnout: How to Spot it and Take Action, recommended actions for handling burnout include suggestions like “getting some sleep” and “trying a relaxing activity.” For someone who feels like they are drowning or suffocating so badly that they feel they need to leave their job or take a permanent leave of absence these kinds of suggestions must feel like a slap in the face.

Is this the best we can do?

Our employee’s mental health and emotional wellness are on the line let alone people’s livelihood and self-esteem. These issues are real and feel real and require a much deeper level of vulnerability as well as common sense into human physiology to figure out how to sustainably approach a solution.

The Cost of Conversations We’re Not Having

Employees waste an average of an 8-hour workday for every crucial conversation they avoid reports VitalSmarts in The Cost of Conflict, Why silence is killing your bottom line. Burnout at work is a crucial conversation we need to be talking about. In fact, we need to talk about it before people get burned out. We need to have open conversations about stress. We need to have conversations about how people feel.

Most people feel totally unqualified to have conversations about other people’s feelings. The “Pandora’s box” that we imagine opening is scary and potentially messy. However, we need to equip out leaders and managers to have these conversations and have them before they turn into a turnover problem. Before they turn into a presenteeism issue. Even before they turn into a productivity problem. When leaders and managers are measuring employee stress and having potentially challenging conversations about emotions and employees’ emotional well-being before it’s a problem, we will be doing something to make a dent in the burnout issue.

Burnout Is Emotional

Burnout at work isn’t going anywhere without a culture shift around how we deal with emotional wellness. Burnout is an emotional issue that requires knowledge and conversations about emotions and physiology. Just because someone is feeling an emotion doesn’t mean they are bad, wrong, unproductive, or unmotivated… it means they are human. Humans live in bodies. Humans feel feelings. Humans have both primal and evolved parts to their brains. And humans go to work. Accepting the fact that employees are humans and bringing the skills to navigate human physiology in the workplace will correct more than just the issues with stress and burnout. It will create sustainable, thriving work cultures.

It’s no secret that the COVID pandemic has, and continues to take its toll on nearly every facet of our lives. Pervasive social inequities, childcare, and homeschooling demands are just a few of the things that have created even greater pressure on our already stress-filled work lives. While many companies and organizations have attempted to rise to the occasion by offering stress reduction programs and additional leadership training there continues to be a sense of unrelenting pressure as employees across all industries have hit the pandemic wall. 

The employee mental wellness crisis isn’t coming sometime off in the future, it’s here now. The Harvard Business Review’s current series on employee burnout has highlighted continually alarming trends, including that 89% of their survey respondents say that their work lives are getting worse and 85% report that their well-being has declined. According to a recent survey conducted by the Global Leadership Forecast, 86% of high-potential employees feel “used up” at the end of the workday. 66% of Human Resources professionals feel the same and about 44% of those leaders are considering changing companies.

Burnout Isn’t a Single Source Issue.

Burnout isn’t a single source issue but rather a confluence of circumstances flowing from both organizational demands as well as employee’s own mental wellness levels. To be clear, it doesn’t matter how “well” an employee’s mental capacities are if the organization in which they are employed creates unsustainable workloads and doesn’t recognize them as being valuable. In turn, what is an employee’s responsibility in making their own needs known and taking care of themselves? In effect, an organization and the people who work within it create a system in which they are interdependent on one another, and the mental wellness levels of the one becomes the mental wellness levels of them both. 

What is Mental Wellness?

What is mental wellness? The World Health Organization (WHO) defines mental health “as a state of well-being in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community.”

Whereas mental health is defined as “a state”, at Motivation Beyond Measure we see mental wellness as more dynamic including those things that we might be, do, and have that promote the state of well-being defined as mental health. From the statistics cited above, it is now obvious that the majority of employees are likely feeling neither fully mentally healthy or well. 

The Very First Thing to Do

In the case of any crisis, the very first thing to do is to get to safety. In many cases, the single act of finding safety physically, psychologically, and emotionally will not only relieve the immediate trauma but also provide room to more efficiently assess the severity of the problem. This is more than just stress reduction and employee wellness programs; safety is the foundation of everything else we do, and how we do it. A perception of psychological safety is foundational not only to team performance but to a person’s capacity to simply attend and be present. 

Behavioral neuroscientist Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory highlights that while our lower brain centers are constantly recognizing threats in the environment our higher brain centers are working to either validate or refute those environmental cues. Just to be clear, we seek signs of the threat first unless refuted by signals of safety. What might those signals of safety be? And how can leaders and managers benefit from relating such signals?

Two Key Issues Compounding the Mental Wellness Crisis

Along with the whole pandemic, there have been two key issues compounding this mental wellness crisis. The first is masks. Hang on… yes, masks are vitally important in minimizing the spread of the coronavirus, and the double-edged sword is that they cover our faces.

Let’s return to the Polyvagal Theory. According to Stephen Porges, an important function of the Vagus Nerve is to slow down our nervous systems, helping us feel calmer and more centered, in other words, safe. Part of the Vagus nerve connects to our face, throat, heart, and middle ear making it a key player in our facial expressions and vocal tones. As humans, when we feel threatened, which we do the majority of the time, the first place we will look to potentially invalidate that threat is at other people’s faces. If we are met with a supportive and caring expression then the threat is minimized. If we are met with a blank or unreceptive expression then the threat is validated and a stress response is activated in our bodies. To this point, wearing masks has been shown to alter the way that people perceive other’s emotions. 

The second issue contributing to a perceived safety gap is the widespread remote working situation, including social distancing. This is a large and complex topic that can’t be easily distilled down, however, let’s focus again on the fact that as humans we are constantly scanning for subtle cues from others that relate, we are safe, and not in fact in danger as our lower brain centers would default to. Similar to masks, while video conferencing has afforded us a layer of safety by not transmitting coronavirus it has also created environments in which we are less likely to pick up on those reassuring subtle cues, like a quickly turned up mouth or flash of concern in the eyes. In addition, increased use of email and text, without the corresponding physical signs of intent tend to contribute to more misunderstandings and misinterpretations.

While they are necessary, the workplace shifts to mask-wearing, video conferencing, as well as increased email and text communication are seriously compounding the mental wellness of people working in organizations by disadvantaging our evolutionary strategy for validating safety. So, what can leaders and managers do short of breaking all the public health guidelines?

Leaders Must Find Their Voices

If leaders are serious about promoting psychologically safe work environments then they must learn to find their voices. One last look at Polyvagal Theory reminds us that the Vagus nerve connects to the throat and middle ear, effectively giving us an additional method of validating a look of safety in someone’s face with vocal changes that match. In the absence of clear facial expressions, vocal tones that project empathy and support can be highly effective. Imagine how you may vocally express concern for a loved one or even a child. The words themselves may be different, but the tones behind the words validate safety. It’s also important to consider that the video medium dampens normal emotion expression to subtle and subtle to non-existent. When conveying supportive emotions and gestures via video it pays extra dividends to slightly exaggerate your smiles, nods, and vocal tones. By implementing these simple tips, leaders and managers may not win an Oscar, but will certainly bring a bit of safety into what feels to many like an unsafe world. 

-Brian Trzaskos, President and Director of Education, Motivation Beyond Measure