It’s the elephant in the room. The demands of work are consistently revealed to be one of the main drivers of workplace stress, employee burnout, and high rates of absenteeism. Yet, while employers want to improve workplace well-being, they struggle to ease demands on their staff in the face of rising productivity requirements and limited resources.
But our new research shows employers can make significant improvements without having to throw money at the issue. Through collective problem solving that involves the staff most affected by heavy workloads, a practical, sustainable response is possible.
Our study focused on four organizations in different sectors that took a “participatory action research” (PAR) approach to reducing workplace stress. In PAR initiatives, organizations create committees of employees drawn from a range of roles and levels. These committees diagnose issues by gathering and analyzing data, then use the resulting insights to design and implement appropriate interventions.
The goal is to ensure that those most impacted by the organization’s problems have an active role in resolving them. This can include redesigning jobs with the explicit goal of reducing stress. By involving employees in developing their own solutions, organizations can foster their ownership of the working structure and acceptance of its limitations.
The PAR approach can have dramatic results. In our study, all four organizations reported important benefits. There was a common perception that peer support and change management improved through using the approach. The collaborative approach also often produced better well-being outcomes, benefiting individual workers and the business.
“Workplace management tools such as Slack, which are intended to boost communication and productivity, were frequently reported as adding to the information overload.”
This is not to suggest PAR initiatives are an easy option. For one thing, organizational design can be challenging. Focused, smaller-scale initiatives, at least to begin with, are more likely to encourage participation and achieve meaningful results. Leaders must select committee members with care to ensure the committee offers a range of views that represent the whole organization. It must also have buy-in and support from management and senior leaders to give it the agency to implement changes.
The PAR approach is intended to be data-driven. The committee must have access to strong data that confirms the nature of the issues it is trying to address and allows it to design the most appropriate responses. Data collection – from workplace surveys, for example – is the first stage of the process. But it should continue throughout the initiative, with the committee monitoring impacts and progress, refining aspects of the approach where the data suggests it is required.
These processes can take time. In our study, all four organizations committed to four PAR sessions over a period of seven months. The initial session focused on scoping. This was followed by a second session one month later to analyze organizational data and the results of a work demands survey, as well as to plan actions. In the third session, after a further two months, the committee assessed progress and made adjustments accordingly. A fourth and final session analyzed a second work demand survey to assess what the initiative had achieved and to specify next steps.
Our study suggests the results justify the time and effort required for PAR initiatives. Where the committee genuinely represents the whole workforce and is given the authority to act, it can implement bespoke solutions to specific issues. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions to workplace stress, so the capacity to be flexible is crucial.
That said, there are some common themes. For example, the PAR initiatives in our study often identified the need for greater recovery time. Staff needed not only more regular breaks, but the option to take them without being interrupted by colleagues, whether in-person or by phone or email. Another common source of stress was interruptions during work that require a high level of concentration and focus.
Information overload was another issue that the committees managing PAR initiatives frequently identified. Many employees felt overwhelmed by the volume of information they received and were expected to synthesize, particularly as it often arrived with little structure and from disparate sources. Workplace management tools such as Slack, which are intended to boost communication and productivity, were frequently reported as adding to the information overload.
By addressing these well-being issues with sensitivity and conveying a sense that they are looking after valued employees, committees can both improve productivity and reduce workplace stress.
Such experiences also reflect broader research findings that suggest that reducing the demands on employees is the most effective way to lower workplace stress. While boosting resources can offer some relief, it often proves short-lived, as the sources of stress remain and inevitably resurface.
In this context, supporting employees to redesign elements of their jobs can be highly beneficial. That might include relational “job crafting” to improve or increase the level of social interactions in a role. It might be cognitive job crafting, prompting the employee to think differently about their job, contextual job crafting, altering the job’s environment, demands, or resources. Or it might be task job crafting, fundamentally altering the job itself.
The key is to identify the specific psychosocial hazards affecting individual employees or sections of the workforce. Employers concerned about stress and well-being often offer a response that is too general, through stress-management programs, say, or employee assistance initiatives, rather than focusing on root causes.
It may not be possible to help the entire workforce all at once. Standard PAR methodology suggests that focusing on 80-100 members of staff at once is optimal. (One organization in our study ran an initiative with 160 employees and found that not everyone in scope was aware of the changes made or felt they had a positive impact.)
Smaller initiatives can be repeated in different areas of the organization, with improvements on previous iterations and adjustments for context.
The bottom line is that all employers should act now. Workplace stress represents a ticking time bomb, with many organizations finding that the problem is getting worse, despite conventional efforts to provide relief.
Our study demonstrates that it is possible to reverse this trend, but it requires collaboration, a degree of flexibility, and a willingness on the part of leaders to listen to and empower those whom workplace stress affects most.
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