Monday Musings -- Measuring & Managing Stress

Stress is an organization-wide risk; not simply or solely something HR must analyze and address.

Across many years, I have heard this exact thing over and again. "Well, that's an HR issue to resolve."

Frankly, that's deliberate (or dumb) deflection in my view.

Every leader, regardless of what business unit they lead, or where in the organization they operate, needs to be engaged in measuring and managing the stress and associated resilience of their respective teams and individual teammates.

A couple of weeks ago, I was on site with a client, including the CEO and Board Chairman, sharing the importance of this exact thing ... managing stress, and working to get ahead of it rather than only responding to it. I shared, "work to be a fire preventer rather than a firefighter."

Both are needed but working to tip the balance in guarding against stress that leads to degraded personal performance and poor/poorer objective outcomes is the better place to expend energy and effort.

Quick digression -- stress is both good and bad. The type of stress that leads to reduced resilience and performance is what we need to measure and manage. Good stress is just that -- good! Positive pressure, for example, is good for us. It sharpens us. It tempers us. It teaches us.

From the linked piece: The first and arguably most important step in managing stress risk is an accurate measurement of stress within your own organization. Many leaders tell us that they view stress as too subjective or personal to quantify. Traditional tools like engagement surveys and pulse checks typically capture only snapshots of sentiment and rarely connect stress to the business outcomes that executives care about most like productivity, cost control, and risk exposure. 

Our Stress Risk Thermometer provides a different approach. Produced as a method of analysis for our research study, it delivers a structured, tiered assessment of employee stress which enables leaders to calibrate their interventions—prompting targeted strategies when a significant portion of the workforce falls into high-stress zones linked to measurable risks.

I bolded the Stress Risk Thermometer above because I don't recall seeing something quite like this approach as they explain previously. Measuring yes, but being more deliberate and detailed about what is measured, where, when, and how is a useful thinking and application exercise.

I appreciate there are follow-up questions based on the initial response results as elucidated in the piece. A couple of things, however, do stick out to me as shortfalls.

Rather than simply asking where one's stress is on a spectrum and a follow-up question, for example, on psychological safety, I also want to understand demographics. Here, the authors (and researchers) impart that things should not be traced to the individual, rather remain in groups. There is likely some sound behavioral-science basis for this thinking. We can ask those demographic questions so we can also contextualize differences we see in an anonymized fashion.

Having worked on this exact thing in my prior career, I know there are pushbacks from the lawyers and in the United States, and likely the same in other countries, there are also some specific laws about how to approach measurement, or surveying "human subject matter" research. It is not all that complicated in practice, just some things that need to be included and incorporated into the applied measurement methods.

It is more important than ever before to also look at the six generations in the workforce. Understanding the intergenerational dynamics and differences are important so the right "radial dials" can be adjusted accordingly. [Here, I prefer the imagery of a thermostat that can be adjusted to a thermometer that can only measure current "temperatures"}.

For example, my Gen Y daughter, who is a working professional, is stressed in ways I am not, and vice versa. She responds to the same situation or stimuli that I face in ways I most likely would not.

Stressors are present for every human, but more data and details are needed to ensure we properly target resilience efforts (social, mental, physical, spiritual components) in the manners and modes most likely to generate positive effects. Avoiding a one size-fits-all approach is necessary.

In summary, I applaud the effort to make this an organization-wide responsibility, and also working in, perhaps, new and novel ways to measure overall individual and organizational health.

Employee Stress Is a Business Risk—Not an HR Problem