How is your employer looking after you?

Just how companies can cut the enormous costs of stress in the workplace is addressed, but how do you know if, at the present time, your organization is looking after you? Ask yourself the following questions.

1.      Do you have to put in a lot of extra hours, take work home with you, or work part of the weekend just to keep up with the volume of work?

2.      Do you feel that your work often interferes with your personal or family life?

3.      Are there a lot of back stabbing, bad temper and irritability in your workplace, especially amongst junior members of staff?

4.      Are you asked to comply with decisions and changes imposed from above without any warning or discussion?

5.      Does management show little interest in understanding workers problems?

If you answer yes to only one of these questions, here are already significant signs of stress. Problems like these are often attributed to the recession and to cost-cutting maneuvers, but there are still adjustments which can be made to improve things even in a poor economic climate. The real fault is more likely to lie in poor management than anything else.

Questionnaire: How well do you handle stress?

	Never	Hardly Ever	Sometimes	Often
My mind kept returning to the problem
I did not let myself become upset when I thought about it
I tried to blank it from my mind
It stopped me sleeping or kept waking me up because I worried about it

Self assessment

Going back now to the number of stress points you had for the life events, adjust them in the following way. For every time you answer ‘never’, give yourself a score of 0, for every ‘hardly ever’ give yourself 1, for every ‘sometimes’ give yourself 2 and for every ‘often’ give yourself 3.

If your score is more than 6 for any of the life events you have suffered in the last year, then you should double your score of stress points for that particular event. For example, you may have scored 4 stress points for marital reconciliation following a painful separation the same year. If you often preoccupied with worries about this during the day, tried to ignore it, and then found you were disturbed by unresolved anxieties at night, your score would double to 8.

If you later divorced, despite the earlier reconciliation, you would have a further 8 stress points from the life even scale, doubling to 16 if the impact it has on you was severe. This would now put you on a total score in the last year of 24 – a significantly high level bearing in mind that anything over 20 signifies an exaggerate degree of stress.