About the Book

The cost of stress to business is staggering. It adds up to more than $300 Billion annually for American businesses- more than 15 times the cost of all strikes combined. In Canada, the annual cost to business is $16 Billion, which is 14% of total net profits.

Now you can make these numbers relevant to you and your business. The StressCosts Formula TM lets you plug in your own numbers to calculate how much stress is costing your organization in hard currency.

It is absolutely possible to recover productivity lost to stress. Traditional stress management programs aren't the answer because they focus on the wrong areas. There is one and only one factor that enables your employees to reduce their stress levels.

StressCosts-Stress Cures lays out the two strategies for recovering productivity lost to stress and explains how to implement them successfully in your organization. 

About the Author

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Ravi Tangri has designed and implemented effective innovation across North America. His success comes from building commitment throughout the organization and making the innovation relevant to the employees who have to make it work. Ravi is a founder of Chrysalis Performance Strategies Elimination Technology TM , which has reduced absenteeism by over 27%. He is the creator of Chrysalis' breakthrough facilitation process, Genesis, used to build the cultural systems that recover productivity lost to stress.

Sample Excerpts or Table of Contents

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CHAPTER 1 - THE BOTTOM LINE

In 1992, a United Nations report called job stress "the 20th century disease." Shortly afterwards, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that it had become a "world wide epidemic." In the decade since then, ongoing change, mergers, and organizational anorexia due to downsizings and 'rightsizings' has produced a workforce that is working harder, less able to balance work and home, more insecure about their future, far more stressed and far less productive.

Stress costs American businesses more than $300 Billion annually in lost productivity, absenteeism, accidents, employee turnover, and medical, legal and insurance fees, and workers' compensation awards. This is more than 15 times the cost of all strikes combined. In Canada, the annual cost to business is $16 Billion, which is equivalent to 14% of total net profits. Total costs to employers for accidents and work-related ill health in the United Kingdom is £7.3 Billion.

Despite figures like these, many managers are uncomfortable dealing with stress. Part of this discomfort is because stress has always been nebulous and hard to quantify. Partly it's because the causes of stress can link to personal issues not related to the job itself. Some managers believe that these issues have nothing to do with the job, that the employee should deal with them, and that they are barriers to managing effectively.

Those issues impact workers' performance and productivity, and thus the organization's profitability and success. Effective management demands that these issues be addressed. Rather than these issues getting in the way of good management, good management is about dealing effectively with these concerns so employees can realize their full potential. In fact, effective leadership is the key to reducing employee stress and to recovering productivity lost to stress.

StressCosts Stress-Cures shows you how to measure the impact of stress to your organization and/or department and identifies the strategies available to you to recover the productivity that has been lost to stress.

The Hard Costs of Stress

The following costs have been substantiated by research and are included in the StressCosts Formula in this book:

- 19% of absenteeism

- 40% of turnover (the cost of turnover is 150-250% of the salary benefit envelope for each position)

- 55% of EAP program costs (consult your provider for a more accurate number - it may be higher)

- 30% of short-term disability and long-term disability costs

- 10% of drug plan costs to cover psychotherapeutic drug costs

- 60% of the total cost of work place accidents

- the total cost of workers' compensation claims and lawsuits due to stress

Making these calculations will provide you with a conservative estimate of what stress costs your organization. There are no solid research findings giving accurate costs for the following factors, and so they have not been included in the formula:

- productivity lost owing to stress while the employee is at work

- violence in the workplace including bullying, sexual harassment, and ethnic/racial harassment

- disability and drug plan costs due to illnesses caused by stress (cardiovascular, etc. )

Stress generally has more of an impact on white-collar workers, on employees lower in the organizational ranks, in the services sector, and on women. Everyday small stressors are generally the most damaging. Each one of these catalyzes 1,400 chemical reactions in your body, some of which continue for hours after the stressor that caused it has passed.

Individuals affected by stress smoke more, eat more, have more alcohol and drug-related problems, are less motivated, have more trouble with co-workers, and have more illness. Stress impairs the immune system, and can result in more infectious diseases, chronic respiratory illnesses, high blood pressure, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, gastrointestinal disorders, depression, and cancer.

What Causes Stress

Causes of stress include increasing workloads and work hours, and a lack of control. These factors can upset employees' work-life balance and increase feelings of helplessness. Generally, employees are more stressed and suffer more ill-effects of stress when they have high demands placed on them, with little control, and/or when they are asked to put in a great deal of effort with little resulting reward.

At the core of these issues is the one and only one factor that accurately predicts whether an employee will be able to effectively manage stressful situations and stay healthy. That factor is his or her sense of personal power. Personal power is your sense of knowing that you have the resources and abilities to handle the issues and challenges that you will encounter. It is the opposite of helplessness.

The greater your personal power, the greater your ability to deal effectively with stressful situations and the greater the chance you will stay healthy. The lower your personal power (and the higher your sense of helplessness), the greater the chance that you will become ill as a result of the stresses you are facing.

How to Recover Productivity Lost to Stress

There are two strategies to enhance the personal power of your employees, and to recover the productivity lost to stress. The first targets your employees directly and helps them build their personal power so they can cope with the stressors that they face. The second approach targets the root cause of stress in organizations, which lies not in your people, but in the culture of your organization itself.

With both approaches, it is essential that you measure the right things to identify what stress is costing you now, and that you measure the im act of your initiatives to show your payback and ROI. Despite the fact that they are readily available, few companies pull out figures such as absenteeism and turnover. If you want to improve your financial performance, you have to measure these 'soft' numbers and their financial impact, and you have to make them count. While most business decisions are based on the 'hard' numbers, financial statements actually hide the impact of both stress and wellness programs.

The first strategy targets your employees directly and generates results fairly quickly. In order to have a real impact, you must use a program that is proven to enhance the personal power of your employees. Traditional stress-management programs fail because they focus on self-care, which has a marginal impact on your ability to deal with stress, and not with personal power. Finding and implementing a program that enhances your employees' personal power can produce measurable and sustainable results in a very short time frame. In fact, it has been shown that effective wellness programs produce an ROI of $1.64 to $6.85 for each dollar invested.

The second approach is more medium-to long-term, and focuses on the roots of stress in your organizational culture and cultural systems. To a large extent your leadership shapes your culture. Traditionally, management has focused more on results and less on people skills. Unfortunately, this focus creates stress, and thus adversely affects results as well. Simply put, organizations that actively support their people out perform those that don't on virtually every financial measure.

Wellness, job satisfaction (which directly impacts profitability), employee commitment, reward, and employees' sense of control are all within the control of the organization. While it was believed that these were all vague, indefinable concepts, hard numbers can be put on these with a wide range of organizational climate and leadership surveys that are available today. You can measure where your organization is, set specific, measurable targets, identify specific behaviours and cultural systems you need to get there, and measure your progress. Once again, it comes down to investing the effort to measure the right things.

While not every organization is ready to examine and rebuild its systems and culture to reach the next level, every organization can help its employees enhance their personal power and cope more effectively with the stressors that they are facing. It is possible to recover the productivity lost to stress. First measure what it's costing you now, measure the factors that are producing stress in your organization, and then decide what action you want to take.