The challenges of managing the changing nature of workplace stress

Abstract

The enterprise culture of the 1980s and the ‘flexible workforce’ of the 1990s and early 2000s have helped to transform the UK economy and other countries in Europe. But, as we were to discover, by the end of these decades there was a substantial personal cost for many individual employees. This cost was captured by a single word — stress. Indeed, stress has found as firm a place in our modern lexicon as texting, BlackBerrys and Big Brother. We use the term casually to describe a wide range of aches and pains resulting from our hectic pace of work and domestic life, ‘I feel really stressed,’ someone says to describe a vague yet often acute sense of disquiet. ‘She’s under a lot of stress,’ we say when trying to understand a colleague’s irritability or forgetfulness. ‘It’s a high-stress job,’ someone says, awarding an odd sort of prestige to his or her occupation. But to those whose ability to cope with day-to-day matters is at crisis point, the concept of stress is no longer a casual one; for them, stress can be a four-letter word pain (Cooper, 2005).