Different research gives different figures for the cost of stress at work but no matter which one you take the cost in the UK runs into tens of billions of pounds and in the US over a hundred billion dollars. This makes the cost of the pandemic seem trivial. The cost of stress in terms of money is huge and in terms of wellbeing even greater. Work life balance is seen by many as the answer, and they have proposed the four-day week as the solution. Whilst it is undoubtedly true that in many cases this helps a great deal and balancing the lives of employees is a good thing, we need to understand why a four-day week is not an effective answer to stress.
In an interview Simon Sinek summed it up beautifully. “If you are working hard at something you hate then that is stress, if you are working hard at something you love then that is passion.” This doesn’t necessarily mean passion for what you are actually doing, it means passion for the job. Many people have incredibly boring and repetitive jobs with low pay and less than perfect working conditions, but they love their work and are not stressed. Others have “fulfilling” jobs with great pay and superb working conditions and yet are stressed to hell. Why is this?
The world of work is about the whole package. It’s not just working hours or pay, or conditions is the whole thing.
When I was an apprentice many years ago just after the earth had cooled and the dinosaurs had died out, I worked for a company in the automotive industry. The shop floor was, to put it mildly less than ideal and yet the people who were the happiest in their work were the ladies who put connectors on the end of break pipes. This was a boring, repetitive job on a noisy shop floor in relatively dirty conditions and certainly not well paid. Yet many of them had worked in the same job for 10, 20 or even 30 years and the one thing they dreaded was compulsory retirement. Why was this? The answer is simple:
Many years before I appeared on the scene as a fresh-faced apprentice the boss of the break pipe area was a genius. He simply organised the ladies so that they say diagonally opposite each other. This way they could talk to each other all day whilst they were doing the job. As one lady told me “it’s great we come to work for a chat as after a couple of months actually doing the job is automatic and we can concentrate on the conversation!!!” Happy ladies.
Today, of course, that job is automated, but the lesson has not changed. It’s not how many hours or days you work that causes stress. It’s not the ease or difficulty or challenging nature of the work that causes stress and when you get beyond a certain basic pay level then it’s not money. It’s whether you love your work. Nobody loves anything all the time but if most days you get up looking forward to work then your work-based stress levels will be low.
The four-day week is a great idea for many. It has been shown to help with work life balance and in many cases improves productivity and reduces stress. What we need to remember though is that it does not address the main problem. If people hate their job, then making them hate it four days a week rather than five only solves 20% of the problem.
I’m a great fan of the four-day week It Is The Four Day Week A Good Idea? and regularly take advantage of working one less day but done badly it can increase my stress level rather than decrease it. If I have myself organised such that I can take an extra day off and still get the work done, then great. However, if all I do is spend the day stressing about the work that is piling up it has the opposite of the desired effect.
Great leaders understand that addressing and solving the problem is the answer and not just reducing it.
In blogs that follow we will be looking at ways to help people to love their job. That’s the effective solution to stress.
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