According to researchers at Harvard and Stanford, a stressful workplace can be taking years from your life. What has been found is that the years of life lost vary depending on education level, gender, and race but the largest determining factor is how stressful a person’s job is. And if you think the amount of stress you put on your employees is merely affecting them and not your company, you couldn’t be more wrong.
It’s a vicious cycle. A person’s job is typically a top source of the stress in their life. According to the American Psychological Association, it is estimated that 70% of Americans experience significant stress related to their work. Stress has daunting health effects which, in turn, affect our performance at work. When our health is affected, our productivity and efficiency levels drop, and more mistakes are made. Worker absenteeism and presenteeism (when an employee is physically at work but not being present and actively working) become major issues. This creates more job stress for your employees and in turn, more stress-related health issues.
And if you think that these employees can be easily replaced, you are not factoring in the resources and cost of finding their replacement, training their replacement, and the learning curve associated with the job. According to an ERE Media Talent Management article by Karlyn Borysenko, the cost of turnover is as follows:
- “For entry-level employees, it costs between 30-50 percent of their annual salary to replace them.”
- “For mid-level employees, it costs upwards of 150 percent of their annual salary to replace them.”
- “For high-level or highly specialized employees, you’re looking at 400 percent of their annual salary.”
Unfortunately, many jobs are indeed viewed as stressful, and oftentimes that is just the nature of the work involved. But how a person interprets their world, and their work, has a great deal to do with their mindset. While you may not completely be able to alter the tasks of a job to be less stressful for the individual, you can help your employees adjust their mindset to be better prepared to handle the stresses that work brings.
Investing in agility and resiliency training for employees and leaders results in:
- Increased productivity
- Greater creativity
- More effective collaboration
- Company-wide innovation
- Increased Employee Engagement
Learn more about the impacts of Agility and Resiliency Training here.
Our Adaptive Mindset programs teach people about the sources of their stress, their pattern of responses to stress, and practical strategies for altering these responses. They are based on decades of research on resiliency as well as new and ground-breaking research in neuroscience.
