Tag Archives: stress

Business

Hate Work Email? Become a French Citizen

google-search-work-stress

Many non-French cultures admire the French. They live in a gorgeous country with a rich history, and, besides, its crammed with sumptuous food and wine. And, perhaps as a result, the French seem to have a very firm understanding of the so-called work-life balance. They’re often characterized as a people who work to live, rather than their earnest Anglo-Saxon cousins who generally live to work. While these may be over-generalized aphorisms a new French law highlights the gulf between employee rights of the French versus those of other more corporate-friendly nations.

Yes, as of January 1, 2017, an employee of a French company, having over 50 staff, has the legal right to ignore work-related emails, and other communications, outside of regular working hours.

Vive la France! More on this “right to disconnect” law here.

From the Guardian:

From Sunday [January 1, 2017], French companies will be required to guarantee their employees a “right to disconnect” from technology as the country seeks to tackle the modern-day scourge of compulsive out-of-hours email checking.

On 1 January, an employment law will enter into force that obliges organisations with more than 50 workers to start negotiations to define the rights of employees to ignore their smartphones.

Overuse of digital devices has been blamed for everything from burnout to sleeplessness as well as relationship problems, with many employees uncertain of when they can switch off.

The measure is intended to tackle the so-called “always-on” work culture that has led to a surge in usually unpaid overtime – while also giving employees flexibility to work outside the office.

“There’s a real expectation that companies will seize on the ‘right to disconnect’ as a protective measure,” said Xavier Zunigo, a French workplace expert, as a new survey on the subject was published in October.

“At the same time, workers don’t want to lose the autonomy and flexibility that digital devices give them,” added Zunigo, who is an academic and director of research group Aristat.

The measure was introduced by labour minister Myriam El Khomri, who commissioned a report submitted in September 2015 which warned about the health impact of “info-obesity” which afflicts many workplaces.

Under the new law, companies will be obliged to negotiate with employees to agree on their rights to switch off and ways they can reduce the intrusion of work into their private lives.

Read the entire article here.

Image courtesy of Google Search.

Idea Soup, tD

Your Job is Killing You

Women_mealtime_st_pancras_workhouse

Many of us complain about the daily stresses from our jobs and our bosses, even our coworkers. We even bemoan the morning commute and the work we increasingly bring back home to complete in the evening. Many of us can be heard to say, “this job is killing me!”. Metaphorically, of course.

Well, researchers at Stanford and Harvard now find that in some cases your job is actually, quite literally, killing you. This may seem self-evident, but the data shows that workers with less education are significantly more likely to be employed in jobs that are more stressful and dangerous, and have less healthy workplace practices. This, in turn, leads to a significantly lower average life span than that for those with higher educational attainment. Researchers measured typical employment-related stressors such as: unemployment, layoffs, absence of employer subsidized health insurance, shift work, long working hours, job insecurity and work-family conflict. The less education a worker has, the more likely that she or he will suffer a greater burden from one or more of these stressors.

Looks like we’re gradually reverting to well-tested principles of Victorian worker exploitation. Check out more details from the study here.

From Washington Post:

People often like to groan about how their job is “killing” them. Tragically, for some groups of people in the U.S., that statement appears to be true.

A new study by researchers at Harvard and Stanford has quantified just how much a stressful workplace may be shaving off of Americans’ life spans. It suggests that the amount of life lost to stress varies significantly for people of different races, educational levels and genders, and ranges up to nearly three years of life lost for some groups.

Past research has shown an incredible variation in life expectancy around the United States, depending on who you are and where you live. Mapping life expectancy around the nation by both county of residence and race, you can see that people in some parts of the U.S. live as many as 33 years longer on average than people in other parts of the country, the researchers say.

Those gaps appear to be getting worse, as the wealthy extend their life spans and other groups are stagnant. One study found that men and women with fewer than 12 years of education had life expectancies that were still on par with most adults in the 1950s and 1960s — suggesting the economic gains of the last few decades have gone mostly to more educated people. The financial crisis and subsequent recession, which put many people in economic jeopardy, may have worsened this effect.

There are lots of reasons that people with lower incomes and educations tend to have lower life expectancies: differences in access to health care, in exposure to air and water pollution, in nutrition and health care early in life, and in behaviors, such as smoking, exercise and diet. Past research has also shown that job insecurity, long hours, heavy demands at work and other stresses can also cut down on a worker’s life expectancy by taking a heavy toll on a worker’s health. (If you work in an office, here are some exercises you might try to prevent this.)

But researchers say this is the first study to look at the ways that a workplace’s influence on life expectancy specifically break down by racial and educational lines.

To do their analysis, they divided people into 18 different groups by race, education and sex. They then looked at 10 different workplace factors — including unemployment and layoffs, the absence of health insurance, shift work, long working hours, job insecurity and work-family conflict — and estimated the effect that each would have on annual mortality and life expectancy.

The data show that people with less education are much more likely to end up in jobs with more unhealthy workplace practices that cut down on one’s life span. People with the highest educational attainment were less affected by workplace stress than people with the least education, the study says.

Read the entire story here.

Image: Women mealtime at St Pancras workhouse, London. Courtesy: Peter Higginbothom. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.

BigBang

Is Your City Killing You?

The stresses of modern day living are taking a toll on your mind and body. And, more so if you happen to live in an concrete jungle. The results are even more pronounced for those of us living in large urban centers. That’s the finding of some fascinating new brain research out of Germany. Their simple answer to a lower-stress life: move to the countryside.

From The Guardian:

You are lying down with your head in a noisy and tightfitting fMRI brain scanner, which is unnerving in itself. You agreed to take part in this experiment, and at first the psychologists in charge seemed nice.

They set you some rather confusing maths problems to solve against the clock, and you are doing your best, but they aren’t happy. “Can you please concentrate a little better?” they keep saying into your headphones. Or, “You are among the worst performing individuals to have been studied in this laboratory.” Helpful things like that. It is a relief when time runs out.

Few people would enjoy this experience, and indeed the volunteers who underwent it were monitored to make sure they had a stressful time. Their minor suffering, however, provided data for what became a major study, and a global news story. The researchers, led by Dr Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, were trying to find out more about how the brains of different people handle stress. They discovered that city dwellers’ brains, compared with people who live in the countryside, seem not to handle it so well.

To be specific, while Meyer-Lindenberg and his accomplices were stressing out their subjects, they were looking at two brain regions: the amygdalas and the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC). The amygdalas are known to be involved in assessing threats and generating fear, while the pACC in turn helps to regulate the amygdalas. In stressed citydwellers, the amygdalas appeared more active on the scanner; in people who lived in small towns, less so; in people who lived in the countryside, least of all.

And something even more intriguing was happening in the pACC. Here the important relationship was not with where the the subjects lived at the time, but where they grew up. Again, those with rural childhoods showed the least active pACCs, those with urban ones the most. In the urban group moreover, there seemed not to be the same smooth connection between the behaviour of the two brain regions that was observed in the others. An erratic link between the pACC and the amygdalas is often seen in those with schizophrenia too. And schizophrenic people are much more likely to live in cities.

When the results were published in Nature, in 2011, media all over the world hailed the study as proof that cities send us mad. Of course it proved no such thing – but it did suggest it. Even allowing for all the usual caveats about the limitations of fMRI imaging, the small size of the study group and the huge holes that still remained in our understanding, the results offered a tempting glimpse at the kind of urban warping of our minds that some people, at least, have linked to city life since the days of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The year before the Meyer-Lindenberg study was published, the existence of that link had been established still more firmly by a group of Dutch researchers led by Dr Jaap Peen. In their meta-analysis (essentially a pooling together of many other pieces of research) they found that living in a city roughly doubles the risk of schizophrenia – around the same level of danger that is added by smoking a lot of cannabis as a teenager.

At the same time urban living was found to raise the risk of anxiety disorders and mood disorders by 21% and 39% respectively. Interestingly, however, a person’s risk of addiction disorders seemed not to be affected by where they live. At one time it was considered that those at risk of mental illness were just more likely to move to cities, but other research has now more or less ruled that out.

So why is it that the larger the settlement you live in, the more likely you are to become mentally ill? Another German researcher and clinician, Dr Mazda Adli, is a keen advocate of one theory, which implicates that most paradoxical urban mixture: loneliness in crowds. “Obviously our brains are not perfectly shaped for living in urban environments,” Adli says. “In my view, if social density and social isolation come at the same time and hit high-risk individuals … then city-stress related mental illness can be the consequence.”

Read the entire story here.

Idea Soup

Mr.Busy

Mr_BusyCompeting with the co-worker who is a frenzy of activity is stressful. You know the type. This person is constantly rushing from one assignment to the next, hosting multiple hallway conversations, leaving meetings to take a call, dropping a call to answer an email, multitasking on 3 devices.

After all, you have to keep up — the busy colleague must be important or must be working on a critical project, right? Yes, it’s entirely possible, and no it could just be mis-perception — busy work is very different to smart work. Regardless, keeping up with “Mr.Busy” creates anxiety, friction and resentment in the workplace.

From WSJ:

Every office has (at least) one—the colleague who is always walking fast, finishing other people’s sentences and racing from meeting to meeting while fielding email, texts and voice mail on multiple devices. That person can appear very important.

They may not know it, but they’re usually causing secondhand stress.

Rushing blocks thoughtful communication and creates worries among colleagues that “maybe I should be doing that, too, or maybe my stuff isn’t as important as his, or maybe he’ll be irritable if I interrupt,” says Jordan Friedman, a New York City stress-management speaker and trainer.

Ray Hollinger was known for years among colleagues in a previous job as a sales-training executive as “Mr. Busy,” he says. In his quest to be a top performer, he says, he often thought, “If all this stuff just keeps coming at me, I will take it on. I will take it all on,” says Mr. Hollinger, founder of More Time More Sales, a Phoenixville, Pa., training firm.

He says he wasn’t aware that his constant motion sometimes made others feel uncomfortable—until a co-worker pointed it out. She told him that when she tried to talk with him, ” ‘your volume goes up, your pace of speaking goes up, and you’re not fully in the conversation,’ ” he says.

Working a few years ago with Rosemary Tator, a Waltham, Mass., leadership-development coach, Mr. Hollinger stopped piling on projects and started blocking out on his calendar the time he needed to achieve realistic goals—including time for interruptions. He also now stops himself when he talks too fast, by “taking a couple of breaths, and lowering my volume and my pace,” he says.

Ms. Tator invites rushers to visualize themselves on video. “What would you think of that person who ran into every meeting late, spent half the time on their cellphone with their email, and had to ask, ‘Could you please repeat that?’ because they weren’t listening?” says Ms. Tator, principal partner in 2beffective, a coaching and consulting firm.

Seeing colleagues—especially managers—operate at a frenzied, frantic pace can make the behavior contagious, says Robert S. Rubin, an associate professor of management at DePaul University, Chicago. He advises managers to hold “inoculation discussions, to inoculate the employee from catching the feeling” that rushing around is necessary to being seen as a good performer.

Open-plan offices help spread the contagion. When the boss has a view of the entire office, “no one wants to be seen as the slowest moving object in the solar system. You have to keep up with the Joneses—literally,” says Ben Jacobson, co-founder of Conifer Research, Chicago, which conducts behavioral and cultural research for companies.

Architects have begun blurring human figures in drawings of new-office projects, to appeal to clients who aspire to active, high-energy workplaces, says Jorge Barrero, a technical designer in Chicago for Gensler, an architecture, planning and design firm. The image is one clients “can connect with on an emotional level,” Mr. Barrero says.

Tom Krizmanic, a principal with Studios Architecture in New York, says about a quarter of the 218 designs he helped judge in a recent office-design competition, co-sponsored by Business Interiors by Staples, showed humans as blurred figures in motion. The trend began about three years ago, he says.

Some people go into overdrive after getting promoted or taking a challenging new job. Surrounded by senior managers, “they’re not the smartest person in the room any more,” says William Arruda of New York City, a personal-branding consultant. Instead of prioritizing their lengthening to-do lists, “they go into hair-on-fire mode, telling themselves, ‘I’m a machine. I get so much done. There’s nothing you can give me that will break me.’ “

“The productivity of entire teams can go down,” Mr. Arruda says. “If you have one person rushing into meetings at the last minute and tapping a pencil through the entire session, it changes the cadence for the entire group.”

To jolt rushers into awareness, he has them ask for written feedback from 10 to 20 colleagues. The form includes such seemingly frivolous questions as, “If I were a household appliance, which one would I be?” Chronic rushers are shocked when co-workers liken them to “a blender whirring around at 9 million miles an hour,” he says.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Mr.Busy. Courtesy of MrMen.

 

Idea Soup

Better Relaxation Equals Higher Productivity

A growing body of research shows that employees who are well rested and relaxed are generally more productive. Isn’t this just common sense? But the notion that employees who are happier and less-stressed outside the workplace can be more effective within the workplace still seems to evade most employers.

[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

THINK for a moment about your typical workday. Do you wake up tired? Check your e-mail before you get out of bed? Skip breakfast or grab something on the run that’s not particularly nutritious? Rarely get away from your desk for lunch? Run from meeting to meeting with no time in between? Find it nearly impossible to keep up with the volume of e-mail you receive? Leave work later than you’d like, and still feel compelled to check e-mail in the evenings?

More and more of us find ourselves unable to juggle overwhelming demands and maintain a seemingly unsustainable pace. Paradoxically, the best way to get more done may be to spend more time doing less. A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health.

“More, bigger, faster.” This, the ethos of the market economies since the Industrial Revolution, is grounded in a mythical and misguided assumption — that our resources are infinite.

Time is the resource on which we’ve relied to get more accomplished. When there’s more to do, we invest more hours. But time is finite, and many of us feel we’re running out, that we’re investing as many hours as we can while trying to retain some semblance of a life outside work.

Although many of us can’t increase the working hours in the day, we can measurably increase our energy. Science supplies a useful way to understand the forces at play here. Physicists understand energy as the capacity to do work. Like time, energy is finite; but unlike time, it is renewable. Taking more time off is counterintuitive for most of us. The idea is also at odds with the prevailing work ethic in most companies, where downtime is typically viewed as time wasted. More than one-third of employees, for example, eat lunch at their desks on a regular basis. More than 50 percent assume they’ll work during their vacations.

In most workplaces, rewards still accrue to those who push the hardest and most continuously over time. But that doesn’t mean they’re the most productive.

Spending more hours at work often leads to less time for sleep and insufficient sleep takes a substantial toll on performance. In a study of nearly 400 employees, published last year, researchers found that sleeping too little — defined as less than six hours each night — was one of the best predictors of on-the-job burn-out. A recent Harvard study estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity.

The Stanford researcher Cheri D. Mah found that when she got male basketball players to sleep 10 hours a night, their performances in practice dramatically improved: free-throw and three-point shooting each increased by an average of 9 percent.

Daytime naps have a similar effect on performance. When night shift air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap — and slept an average of 19 minutes — they performed much better on tests that measured vigilance and reaction time.

Longer naps have an even more profound impact than shorter ones. Sara C. Mednick, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Riverside, found that a 60- to 90-minute nap improved memory test results as fully as did eight hours of sleep.

MORE vacations are similarly beneficial. In 2006, the accounting firm Ernst & Young did an internal study of its employees and found that for each additional 10 hours of vacation employees took, their year-end performance ratings from supervisors (on a scale of one to five) improved by 8 percent. Frequent vacationers were also significantly less likely to leave the firm.

As athletes understand especially well, the greater the performance demand, the greater the need for renewal. When we’re under pressure, however, most of us experience the opposite impulse: to push harder rather than rest. This may explain why a recent survey by Harris Interactive found that Americans left an average of 9.2 vacation days unused in 2012 — up from 6.2 days in 2011.

The importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology. Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we’re meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]