Employers have several reasons to keep their workplaces as safe as possible, but in this era of heightened stress nationwide, that task has never been more complicated. Many companies focus the bulk of their efforts on mitigating physical workplace hazards, but insightful managers take time to identify less visible threats that can be equally harmful, if not more so.
One of the leading and most damaging invisible threats to workplace safety is stress. And these days, people are stressed to the max before even showing up to start work. A few of the underlying reasons for increased stress levels range from cultural clashes, and political unrest, to ongoing frustration with the Covid pandemic and its associated protocols.
Throw in a slew of economic woes such as skyrocketing housing prices, sticker shock at the fuel pump, inflation ranked among the “highest in the world” and stock market jitters, and it is understandable why so many people are on edge these days. It’s also why companies need to take careful notice and be proactive before something unwanted happens.
Often called a silent killer, stress contributes to serious medical disorders leading to the early deaths of countless Americans each year. The impacts of stress on workplace safety can include one’s personal mental and physical wellbeing. Heightened tension in workers can also lead to direct and broad, long-term negative impacts on the applicable company, causing untold levels of harm.Â
Though our list is not all-inclusive, here is a sample of the myriad ways employee stress can affect workplace safety:
Mental Health Impacts on Workers
Wellness in the workplace has become an increasingly hot topic in recent years, as employers recognize the plethora of risks related to workplace mental well-being…and the rewards of avoiding those problems.
Common mental health effects of excessive stress levels include:
- Demoralization
- Demotivation
- Depression
- Apathy
- Anger
No employer can address every element that affects their employees’ wellness, especially since many of these stressors come from outside the workplace. Still, employers can take the following actions:
- Identify and help reduce workplace stressors through training and team-building activities;
- Strive to understand and empathize with workers whose stressors initiate outside of the workplace, through individual feedback sessions;
- Offer resources and services designed to reduce stress and address underlying causes, through workplace wellness programs, improved HR policies, or boosted employee benefits.
Check out SHRM’s How to Establish and Design a Wellness Program to learn more.
Physical Health Impacts on Workers
The above-listed mental health effects of too much stress can often and quickly lead to tangible, externally-noticeable outcomes, too:
- Excessive fatigue
- Aggression
- Increased risk of physical injuries
- Increased risk of self-medication through substance use or abuse
- Increased risk of physical confrontations or workplace violence
Employers have a responsibility to ensure physical workplace safety. Effectively doing so requires a clear-eyed and objective assessment of the workplace climate. This assessment must be tailored to capture meaningful, actionable data.
Since the point is to identify problem areas (and not make them worse), climate surveys should be administered in a way that protects employee confidentiality and offers safeguards against the possibility of retaliatory measures.
Check out TRACC’s 7 steps to a successful organizational climate assessment to learn more.
Direct Impacts on the Organization
All of the mental and physical health risks we’ve reviewed so far can be caused or exacerbated by increased stress. And since the stress from anyone’s personal and work lives can overlap at times, it doesn’t matter where the stress originates.
Like it or not, worker stress is an employer’s problem because people carry their burdens to work. Once there, those issues can take root and grow, infecting others and causing chaos in the company. A few direct impacts that a single stressed-out worker can cause include:
- Reduced team coherence
- Hostile work environment
- Loss of efficiency and effectiveness
- Loss of productivity
- Lost revenue
It is plain to see the direct link between stress, mental health, physical health, and their impacts on an organization. If the stress-related problems of even one employee go ignored or unaddressed, their stewing issues can rise to a boil and spill over everything, causing destructive harm.
Meanwhile, imagine the problems waiting in the wings if several employees are coping with stress. Such work centers could be powder kegs ready to erupt if the wrong incident sparks.
Check out Breezy’s From Hostile to Hopeful: Exactly How to Fix a Toxic Work Environment to learn more.
Broader Organizational Impacts
As we said initially, stress can lead to both direct and broader, long-term negative impacts. Like a snowball that grows larger as it rolls downhill, minor problems can expand and cause a cascade effect. Defined by Oxford Reference as “a sequence of events in which each produces the circumstances necessary for the initiation of the next,” cascade effects are sometimes unforeseeable – yet are often entirely predictable and preventable.
If stress in the workplace isn’t correctly handled promptly, a few adverse cascade effects that an organization might expect are:
- Risk of staffing loss due to employees quitting, being fired, or going on strike
- Increased risk of post-incident litigation
- Damage to organizational reputation
- Difficulty with employee retention and recruitment
- Breach of consumer trust
- Loss of revenue
If the organization is a company, any and all of the above problems can be detrimental to that business’ bottom line. Ethical scandals, for example, are a surefire cascading method to tank a company in all of the above areas.
Consider the devastating PR fallout with United Airlines after a stress-filled incident in 2017 that started with a single seated passenger minding his own business. Stress quickly led to agitation by the involved parties, escalating to a physical confrontation caught on a video that went viral.
In the case of United, in hindsight, it’s not hard to see where the employee mistakes were made or how better policies and foreplanning – or at very least a more appropriate immediate response – could have saved the airline from a $1.4B stock drop and severe public backlash.
When Employees Turn into Saboteurs
Stressed-out workers won’t typically try to sabotage their organizations intentionally, but there’ve been cases where disgruntled employees did exactly that. The business world has no shortage of horror stories about insider threats, from workers tampering with computer networks to stealing valuable data or intellectual property.
Of course, organizations should carefully screen employees before hiring. But circumstances change, and the work around us is changing. Most situations involving intentional insider threats may have started harmlessly.
But as those workers’ stress and resentment grew, they eventually turned against their own employer to “act on a personal grievance.” In most cases, those situations probably could have been foreseen and avoided.
The odds of an insider threat may seem low, but the risk of dire consequences never is. Thus, this is yet another reason why companies should do everything in their power to support stressed workers. Keep your employees engaged and talking to avoid a potential frustration turning into resentment.
Check out Inc’s 8 Toxic Employees Who Ruin Great Companies to discover how one worker’s actions can destroy a company’s culture.
