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The Role of Workplace Health Promotion in Addressing Job Stress
Submitted by anonymous » Fri 04-Sep-2020, 01:46Subject Area: GeneralKeywords: education | 1 member rating |
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Job stress affects both an employer and an organization; particularly, it leads to human and economic costs. Therefore, companies are forced to use various workplace health promotion interventions to solve the issue. This paper will be devoted to the points presented in the article “The Role of Workplace Health Promotion in Addressing Job Stress.” Besides, other sources will be used to discuss the feasibility of using these points in the real business case. The main attention will be devoted to the practical recommendations about the ways of applying various activities for reducing the number of job stressors. Workplace health model will be also offered because workplace health promotion should be systematic.
The article discusses the origins of occupational stress and its outcomes. In particular, job stress happens when external conditions do not respond to an employee’s needs or when a person does not have enough skills and knowledge to deal with a situation. The common examples of job stressors are work overload, unsatisfied communication between supervisors and employees as well as low involvement in decision-making. These situations lead to health issues (e.g. depression, cardiovascular disease), unhealthy behaviors, absenteeism, high labor turnover, and low productivity of staff. Besides, the article includes the analysis of different approaches to stress management within an organization. Most of critics agree that it is reasonable to use both individual and setting-based interventions. The article contains the example of using stress interventions on three levels (individual employee, the organization and the organization-individual interface). Overall, the article has two parts. The aim of the first part is to provide weak points of individual interventions and analyze the need for applying comprehensive approach. The aim of the second part is to offer practical guidelines for introducing comprehensive interventions and their effects on addressing job stress.
Individual-focused interventions deal with attitudes to health and behavior of an individual worker. Their aim is to give information and practical recommendations about the ways of managing work-related pressures. For example, organizations offer personal counseling, relaxation training, and lifestyle training. At the same time, these stress management programs ignore the influence of working conditions (e.g. social, organizational, and physical). This is wrong because individual symptoms of stress frequently arise as the result of organization-level issues. The lack of stress coping skills is not the main reason of job stress. Besides, helping individuals to deal with stressful working conditions without addressing these conditions is against occupation legislation in many countries. Finally, individual employee-oriented stress management programs do not lead to significant positive outcomes (improvement of health and productivity rates).
However, low efficiency of individually oriented stress management strategies does not mean that companies should stop using them at all. Employees do need to know how they can manage stressful situations. Today, companies provide employees much information about stress management, so a lack of knowledge about dealing with stress is not the key reason of job stress. Over time, rejecting of the individual approach might lead to negative outcomes. Even now, there are companies that do not provide training to their employees in order to educate and train them how to behave during and after conflicts with customers. These organizations have low productivity.
Comprehensive stress prevention interventions deal with organizational causes of job stress as well as with the symptoms of stress showed by specific workers. The combination of methods causes more positive long-term effects than using individual approach. At the same time, the effectiveness of comprehensive workplace health promotion depends on the gender of a person. Women respond to health promotion more than men do. This aspect should be considered during creating workplace health promotion plans and monitoring their effectiveness. The main benefits of the comprehensive approach are the improvement of the psychological health of employees, increasing of job satisfaction, decreasing of sickness absenteeism, improvement of organizational commitment and performance. Moreover, low-paid workers respond to a comprehensive approach that was not seen with individual strategies.
Normally, job stressors arise for a job itself or social and organization contexts in which jobs are done. For example, employees may suffer from stress due to heavy workloads, poor communication, and lack of support from supervisors or reduced involvement in decision-making. Besides, workplace health promotion specialists create strategies based on the demand-control-support (DCS) model of job stress or Siegrist’s effort/reward imbalance (ERI) model. According to the first model, job stress appears when employees do not have support from supervisors and colleagues as well as they are not involved in decision-making. According to the second model, job stress occurs when there is an outstanding gap between job demands and rewards for performing it. The experience of many companies proves that both models should be considered. Employees should be provided with support from supervisors and team members. They should also have rights to participate in decision-making. Besides, adequate rewards are also very important. Employees should see and feel that their efforts are appreciated by an organization.
The subject matter from the article could be successfully used in a real business case. During the research, workers were asked to take part in participatory action-oriented training and create team-based improvement plans. Based on the stress survey, 24 individuals were interviewed by the investigator. Organizational and individual level activities led to some positive outcomes, particularly blue-collar workers had improvement of the physical environment, rewards system, work climate, job requirements, and organization system. White-collar workers had the enhancement of the occupational climate. Besides, the workplace health promotion demonstrated an outstanding effectiveness in governmental organizations.
However, applying of workplace health promotion in a real business case will be successful only if a company has a systemic approach to this issue. The organization’s health promotion model should have four essential steps. The first step is the assessment that is necessary for determining employee health risks and analyzing today’s health promotion interventions, needs, and capacity. Assessment is performed through employee health survey, conversations, opinion box, etc. The second step is planning process. Specialists create parts of a workplace health program, choose key interventions, and make an organization infrastructure. The third step is program implementation. This step includes all the steps that are necessary for making health promotion programs available for personnel. The final step is the evaluation of the program. The step involves systematic analyzing of the quality, effectiveness, and significance of interventions.
The article “The Role of Workplace Health Promotion in Addressing Job Stress” discusses the effectiveness of worker-focused and setting-based interventions in managing job stress. The author of the article found that comprehensive approach causes the most significant outcomes. This approach addresses both organizational causes of stress and symptoms of stress demonstrated by individual employees. Other researches also prove the reliability of comprehensive stress management programs. However, it is important to apply a systemic approach to workplace health promotion. It should include assessment, planning process, program implementation, and evaluation.
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