stress – Workforce

October 22, 2019June 7, 2022

Hourly Worker Burnout Is a Major Problem. Stop Overlooking It.

The CareerCast stress report analyzes 11 factors that represent the most common stressors including deadlines, public scrutiny and physical demands.

When you hear the word “burnout” in the context of the workforce, a specific image comes to mind. You might picture a lawyer or consultant logging 80 hours a week and managing high-intensity clients, pushed over the edge by a messy court case or a business trip gone wrong.

You’re probably less likely to picture the service worker giving you your burger and fries or health care provider caring for your aging parents at home, overcome by prolonged periods of mild stress. However, shift workers are equally, or perhaps even more, prone to burnout than corporate professionals.

As technology and automation advance to simplify the lives of skilled laborers, the needs of low-wage hourly workers are forgotten. Corporations feel pressured to increase productivity, which creates a chronically stressful environment for workers who are on the frontlines dealing with customers every day.

The Wave of Burnout in Hourly Workforces

Burned out employees are now commonplace in industries requiring an hourly workforce. White-collar workers may take certain job elements for granted, such as predictable hours and flexibility over where they work for the day. But these perks rarely exist for hourly shift workers. Shift managers receive pressure from higher-ups to build schedules that maximize profits and minimize the number of employees needed on a shift, meaning schedules promote high stress and often differ from week to week.

Erratic scheduling is made worse by chronic understaffing, thanks to low unemployment – ultimately leading to increased demands on the existing workforce. For the first time ever in the U.S., the number of open jobs has been higher than the number of people looking for work for 17 straight months. Low-skilled workers such as nurses and restaurant workers are in the highest demand as more people go to college and more baby boomers reach retirement.

This has led hourly workers to form different relationships with their work. For once, low-skilled workers have leverage in the job market and may be inclined to find new workplaces if their own current conditions are not optimal. In July, 3.6 million people quit their jobs – the highest number ever in a single month.

Employers should be feeling more heat than ever to improve work conditions and worker satisfaction. Doing so needs to start with empowering your workforce through better management practices that give employees control and recognition. Using a digital workplace is a powerful, cost-effective way to ensure your workers don’t burn out.

Leveraging Digital Workplace Tools to Prevent Burnout

Promoting worker engagement can be the difference between burned out workers on the verge of quitting and satisfied employees. Digital workplace tools enable managers to spend more time engaging with customers and employees and give back some of the power frontline workers lack. By optimizing these areas with new technology, you can set up your workforce and customers for lasting success.

Keep communication fluid. Just as it’s important for workers to receive clear communication from higher-ups, it is crucial for managers to accept feedback from those working the frontline. An internal communications platform simplifies the process for getting in touch with employees and opens up opportunities for your workforce to connect, share and receive important information. These tools can also boost retention by ensuring that employees receive the recognition they need to stay satisfied through measures like badges, gamified leaderboards and mobile communication.

Allow agency in scheduling. Burnout among hourly workers is often attributed to stress over scheduling, particularly in industries where employees may not know their hours for the week until the day before. This is exacerbated by paper schedules that hinder last-minute changes. A digital workplace allows employees to request time off and swap shifts with coworkers directly, giving them a healthier work-life balance and a more predictable schedule.
Create opportunities for upskilling. Providing ongoing training to build new skills is an excellent way to ensure employees feel satisfied at work. Unfortunately, it’s often neglected because it can be time-consuming to build and deliver, and therefore costly. Digital tools enable employers to deploy low-cost, personalized training across your company to boost engagement and productivity.

Though retention and workplace management seem trickier than ever, employers are not powerless against the labor shortage, nor the wave of burnout. Instead, use this as an opportunity to stand out as an excellent employer by taking your management processes to the next level. Doing so positions you as the upstanding employer that workers will turn to when another has driven them to burn out.

October 10, 2019June 29, 2023

Managing Mental Health Crises at Work

employers mental health; Millennials and mental health

Talking about suicide does not need to be taboo.

Mental Health America’s 2019 “The State of Mental Health” report has some concerning statistics. While adult prevalence of mental illness has been relatively constant, suicidal ideation, or suicidal thoughts, has increased from 3.77 percent in 2012 to 4.19 percent in 2017.

“That’s over 10.3 million adults in the U.S. with serious thoughts of suicide,” the report noted. Meanwhile, more than 10 million adults in the U.S. have an unmet need for mental health treatment.

Companies should understand how suicide could impact not only a person’s family and loved ones, but also their co-workers, clients and everyone around them, said Ali Payne, practice leader for organizational wellbeing at insurance brokerage Holmes Murphy.

“I think the way we make sure people feel connected is having a strategic relationship with leaders and having leaders be open about how it impacts them or how they do business,” Payne said. She suggested creating a work environment where open conversations are encouraged.

Leaders should educate themselves of the available resources and prepare themselves if a mental health crisis happens, she said.

Suicide is a significant public health issue both in the United States and worldwide. Between 1999 and 2016, suicide rates have increased in every state in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Further, the World Health Organization estimates that one person dies of suicide every 40 seconds worldwide.

“Our Global Suicide Crisis,” a 2019 report from Prudential, notes that while it’s understood that depression and anxiety can be precursors to suicide, there isn’t yet enough known about the many reasons behind suicide to prevent it. Still, addressing depression and anxiety can help.

One way to address mental health in the workplace is by adopting best practices such as telehealth for behavioral health and on-site mental health clinicians, the report notes. It also stressed that when an employee takes time off to deal with a mental health episode, managers should remain in contact with them. “This may not only help an employee through depression — it can also reduce their fear of returning to work,” the report noted.

Workplace benefits and policies like this are valuable, Payne said, but employers and managers can also learn about accessible community-based resources that address mental health. These resources include mental health services provided by and crisis hotlines, government organizations, state-based organizations and local hospitals and health providers.

“A lot of employers don’t always know what those resources are, and they sometimes take them for granted until they’re impacted by [a mental health crisis],” Payne said. “Then they might take the initiative to figure out what those resources are. But I always say, let’s be as proactive as we can and really try to get a handle on what [these resources] are even outside of what we’re buying today.”

Co-workers can also benefit from guidance in learning how to address what they think may be a mental health crisis in a colleague. It may not be a comfortable situation, Payne said, but part of the training she does for clients is based around understanding how to help struggling colleagues.

Productivity Expectations

One work reality that may impact an employee’s mental health is rising productivity expectations, Payne said. “Right now we’re all asking our people to do more with less,” she added, saying that employees are more often wearing many hats and pitching in wherever the company needs them. “We need to make sure we’re thinking about how workload impacts people.”

Even though employers understandably want employees to be their most productive selves, that’s difficult for an employee when they are having mental health problems. It’s an added stress as well if they still feel workplace pressure to be at maximum productivity even when they’re not feeling good, Payne said.

“If they’re feeling like this, they’re definitely not going to bring their whole self to work. They’ll leave a majority of what they need and what they want somewhere else,” she said.

She also suggests that team leaders learn to help people recognize when they’re not feeling 100 percent and when they need to take a break.

Personalizing Programs

“We can’t just say that mental health affects everyone the same way,” Payne said. Financial stress may negatively impact one person’s mental health while career stress may cause a similar reaction in someone else. There isn’t one simple solution to address this workplace issue.

“There’s no silver bullet to anything, and that’s what everyone wants,” she said. “Everyone wants this silver bullet that’s going to solve all the problems in mental health, like stress management.”

While stress management programs have some value, stress impacts everyone differently. People can improve their resiliency, but even so they may not be as resilient of a person as someone else, Payne said. Some people are just more resilient than others. Simply investing in programs meant to increase employees’ resiliency is not enough to address stress and mental health, she said.

Payne encourages her clients to consider all the resources they have at their disposal that can be impactful to different people with different needs who are struggling.

“It doesn’t mean that they’re struggling all the way to suicide,” Payne said. “It might just mean they’re struggling in general. How do we make it OK to not be OK?”

Further national, state and local resources:

Employees Learn Gardening Basics Through Workplace Program

Fresh fruits and vegetables may be a luxury for certain people and communities, but some organizations are taking a proactive step by creating companywide gardens on their campuses.

Intuit Inc. and PayPal are two companies that use StartOrganic in their workplaces. Founded by Josh Levine and Troy Smothermon in 2011, StartOrganic is a California-based company that brings organic gardening education to employers, schools and private residences.

For organizations with larger locations like Intuit’s Silicon Valley campus and PayPal’s campus in San Jose, employees can plant and harvest their bounty at work. For smaller organizations or high-rise offices, there are educational programs so employees can start gardening at own home.

The art and the science of growing one’s own food has been lost, Levine said, and companies can carry the social influence needed to promote that.

“If they’re able to provide growing space or if they champion a cause like, ‘It’s important for people to know how to grow their own food,’ then they’ll influence the community around them,” he said.

Even on campuses with a lot of space for corporate gardens, that’s not necessarily the end goal of the program, according to Levine.

“We’re there every week to teach them the ins and outs of practically growing their own food so that they can take that home and start their own home garden,” he said. StartOrganic provides gardening tools on site, from trowels to cutting utensils.

Smothermon or Levine will hold a monthly class for all the growers to prepare them for the next month of their garden. Additionally, one of them goes on site once a week to answer questions and provide guidance to growers.

Also read: Green Thumbs and Living Walls in Urban Areas

Robert Scontrino, developing engineering manager at PayPal, is one employee who has taken his gardening skills back to his home, where he has a 2-year-old daughter and two garden plots. “That’s something that I might not have done if I wasn’t part of this program,” he said.

It also allows Scontrino to carry on a tradition that he grew up with as a boy. His grandfather did a lot of gardening. While Scontrino didn’t do very much in his grandfather’s garden, he spent a lot of time in the garden itself, observing what was going on and eating the food.

“[The PayPal garden] does bring back some of those memories,” he said. “There’s a lot of rosemary in the garden, and smelling that rosemary actually brings back some very fond memories of me spending time with my grandfather in his garden.”

Scontrino also enjoys the campus garden because it allows him to meet people with similar interests. The overall experience has been “quite the learning experience,” he said, and he’s picked up knowledge like what plants grow in what seasons, how to grow them and when to pick them.

Also read: Workplace Gardens Taking Root

He also appreciates gardening as a way to help relieve the stress of the work day. He tries to find the time to walk to the garden a couple times a day to unwind and see what’s going on.

Gay Jacobs, executive assistant to VP, general counsel, at PayPal, also participates in the program. As someone who appreciates organic food and has a plant-based diet, this is one way for her to access healthy, fresh organic food. “It’s been eye-opening just to see the process and to see how long it takes to grow [vegetables] and how much fresher they are.”

She typically spends time in the garden twice a week, on Tuesdays when Levine is there to answer questions, and on Fridays before the weekend starts. During growing season, she can check on her plants before the weekend, then in harvest season she’ll pick food that she can use the following Sunday to meal-prep for work. She starts out each day with a protein-packed green smoothie and eats salads every day.

Jacobs also appreciates the social and community aspect of the garden. “You see everyone else out their tending to their gardens, and we talk about what’s going on,” she said. If she and other gardeners are growing different things they sometimes will share with each other.

Also read: Consider Fresh Air and Relaxed Hikes to Combat Work Stress

Loved ones in her life also give her ideas on what to do with her harvest. “One time, I had a foot-long zucchini. I didn’t know what to do with it!” she said. A friend suggested she make zucchini bread, and after experimenting with the recipe, it’s now one of her favorite things to make. She’s looking forward to zucchini season this year so that she can further perfect her recipe.

Gardening has allowed her to add new elements to her go-to dishes and soups. For example, while she was growing broccoli, she noticed how big the leaves were and wondered if they were edible. After some research, she confirmed that they are edible and chops them up for soups.

PayPal has 56 plots, up from 15 plots when the program began in 2013, and generally two employees share a plot, said Julie Vennewitz-Pierce, director of PayPal Gives. All employees are welcome to sign up and there’s usually a wait list that gives employees a spot on a first-come, first-served basis.

“The goal was, and still is, to provide an opportunity for employees to grow fresh vegetables, herbs and flowers in the spirit of environmental sustainability and employee wellness,” Vennewitz-Pierce said.

Moving forward, this year PayPal is working with StartOrganics to launch a composting program. Employees can learn how to compost scraps for their plots and how use that compost in their gardens.

PayPal also has a garden with 40 plots at its offices in Omaha, Nebraska, Vennewitz-Pierce said. This one isn’t managed by a vendor but by the company’s facilities team.

Currently, StartOrganic operates in California, Smothermon said. California works best from a logistical point of view. Growing seasons are different in various geographic areas of the country, and there are certain plant diseases that happen in some parts of the country but not others.

But its founders are open to working other places, he added. For example, a company in New York requested its services for an educational program.

“No matter where you’re growing, there are some basics that are universal,” Smothermon said. “Even in New York, once the weather warms up a bit, you want to have the same sort of infrastructure.”

December 10, 2018June 29, 2023

Help Workers Save for Rainy Days, Not Just Golden Years

There is a savings crisis in America. Eight out of 10 workers are living paycheck to paycheck, and though many employers have started to prioritize financial wellness in recent years, they are doing little to prepare employees for financial emergencies that could end up affecting their performance in the workplace.

While it’s true that a lot of companies offer 401(k)s to help employees save for retirement, they aren’t a feasible option for many U.S. workers, regardless of employer contributions. The Federal Reserve Board’s 2018 “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households” shows that 40 percent of people can’t even afford a $400 emergency, much less afford to set money aside for retirement.

401(k)s have their place in financial wellness, but that place is not savings for events prior to retirement. There are substantial fees associated with withdrawing funds before retirement.

These fees impact a lot of people: 44 percent of Americans report having to tap into their retirement before they hit age 59 and a half for things like grad school, debt reduction and unexpected hospital visits.

There is a 10 percent penalty for early withdrawals. On top of that, employees must also pay income tax on the money they withdraw, making these accounts even less useful for unexpected expenses prior to retirement.

Financial Worry Hurts the Bottom Line

But early withdrawal fees are just one symptom of the larger problem of ongoing financial stress. Last year, nearly 60 percent of people surveyed said they were anxious about their future financial state. And even more concerning, more than 30 percent reported being worried about how they’ll make ends meet in the present.

Also read: What Ails Financial Wellness Plans

This financial stress leads to big problems in the workplace. For example in 2017, financial worry caused employees to miss an average of 3.4 work days, and nearly a third of financially stressed employees say their money concerns carry over into their job, affecting their productivity and focus.

SafetyNet asked thousands of workers what they would like from their companies, and most noted they wanted help saving money, especially for unexpected emergencies. But few employers are offering help when it comes to rainy day savings.

Also read: Assessing the Value of Financial Wellness for Your Employees

Employers Can Help by Offering Short-term Savings Programs

The good news is that improving employees’ financial security is solvable.

Some companies, like Aetna, have started using incentive-based financial programs to educate employees on basic money management. Still, only 17 percent of large companies offer these types of programs and employees want financial tools in addition to education.

Prudential Financial is throwing their hat in the ring by helping employees set up an after-tax savings option within their 401(k)s. This model enables employees to gather after-tax contributions from their paycheck and have a lower withdrawal fee than the pre-tax contributions do, making these funds easier to use as emergency savings if needed.

One option becoming popular for employers is a short-term savings program, which holds funds that people can access at any time.

Different from traditional savings accounts, these programs (sometimes called “rainy day funds”) are typically sponsored by employers. They work by stowing funds in dedicated savings accounts. A few varieties already exist.

CookieJar, for example, is an employer-sponsored savings account that rounds up spare change from employees’ debit card purchases and gives companies the option to match those contributions. This type of program is low-cost — far below those of a 401(k) for the employer, and free to the employee.

And with Congress attempting to make it easier for employers to set up these types of programs, you can expect to see more in the future.

Given the amount of time and energy currently lost to financial stress, these programs could have a major impact on the well-being — and the bottom line — of your company.