We need to change the way we think about work and how it influences our lives, says chartered psychologist Rob Archer

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WHEN colleagues take time off for illness, most of us assume they have a cold, flu or a stomach bug, perhaps. Few realise that 49 per cent of all working days lost in the UK in 2016-17 were caused by work-related stress, depression or anxiety.

Stress is an insidious problem. Short-term stress, such as working to an imminent deadline, can be beneficial. But if the pressure never goes away, it risks leading to chronic stress, which can bring on significant mental health issues. This, in turn, creates further stress on the employee and their colleagues and families.

There are also consequences for physical health: studies have shown that long-term stress leads to a compromised immune system, contributing to debilitating headaches, digestive disorders and cardiovascular disease. Very few firms know how to improve this dire situation; in fact, many are unwittingly making things worse. The good news is, we are starting to get a handle on how to beat stress and – even better – prevent it from becoming a problem in the first place.


“A “flat-line” working style with no variation in intensity helps no one”

One of the most important protective factors is a resource known as psychological flexibility. Studies have shown that it has profound effects on mental health and workplace performance, helping people do their jobs more effectively while improving health and well-being. “Psychological flexibility allows people to become more resilient in their responses to high work demands,” says Rob Archer, a chartered psychologist who works with a number of companies and sports professionalsto promote health and well-being while improving individual and team performance.

Archer defines psychological flexibility as an ability to let longer-term values and goals, rather than immediate thoughts and emotions, govern decision-making and behaviour. “Primarily, psychological flexibility helps create a different relationship to thoughts and emotions,” Archer says. “Some people call it ‘unhooking’ – they become less powerful as drivers and motivations.”

There is strong evidence that it works. A 2004 study in a group of Swedish healthcare workers, for example, found it made a significant difference in absence from the workplace. In the study, workers who reported chronic stress or musculoskeletal pain were split into two groups. Both groups received the standard medical treatment, but one group also participated in sessions designed to improve psychological flexibility through acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). This group subsequently took an average of 1 day off per year. The group that received standard medical treatment were still taking 11.5 sick days per year on average.

A 2011 study in the US also showed strong effects for ACT interventions among nearly 700 addiction counsellors. Burnout is a big problem in this kind of work, and the researchers found that it can be reduced through strengthening psychological flexibility. Rather than struggling against a workplace and routine that are difficult to cope with, the counsellors benefited from learning how to identify, clarify and commit to their work-related goals and values while working within the system. “It helps people to deal with the situations they find themselves in,” Archer says. “It’s one thing to have a depressive thought about work, and see the thought itself as a problem. It’s quite another to see it as a very normal reaction to a very difficult situation. The key is gaining control over your response and behaviour, rather than trying to control thoughts and emotions.”

Gaining such perspective can have wide impacts. If immediate demands overwhelm workers, they often start to be hooked away from their values. “Once you lose touch with your values, it can lead to huge risks, both for individuals and organisations,” Archer says. “You could argue that the whole of the financial crisis was caused by people being separated from their values.”

There’s some evidence that psychological flexibility helps leaders and teams too: interventions designed to promote psychological flexibility work for financial traders as well as healthcare workers. In 2012, Frank Bond at Goldsmiths, University of London tested the effects of ACT training in team leaders of financial traders working for an investment bank. In the eight months following the training, the teams led by those who had received ACT training made around £17 million more than those whose leaders had received training in negotiation skills. Significantly, they also reported better mental health.

Better mental health

For Archer, this feels like the future of workplace psychology. But he is keen to point out that the burden of dealing with stress in the workplace must fall on employers too. “An organisation needs to help people deal with the demands placed on them,” he says.

Equipping staff with psychological flexibility allows them to get through the tough periods by maintaining awareness of their values and goals – remembering why they got into their job in the first place, say, and what the short-term intense work will help them achieve.

But it’s important that these high-intensity stints don’t become never-ending, Archer says: for people to work well, we have to move away from a culture of permanent high performance. “For most people, demands are so high and so unrelenting that recovery isn’t built in,” Archer says. “We’re much better off having demands as a series of sprints than one long slog that never ends.”

“Once you lose touch with your values, it can lead to huge risks”

A “flat-line” working style with no variation in intensity helps no one, Archer points out; workers get tired and disengaged, and their performance drops. That means tasks take longer, extending the vicious cycle of underachievement. “People stop enjoying their work and everything’s a slog: the flat line leads to burnout eventually,” Archer says.

The other big issue is control: when people feel that they are trusted to manage their own workload, stress levels tumble. “The evidence in favour of job control is so overwhelming that any enlightened organisation has to clamp down on micromanagement,” he says.

It’s an insight that some business leaders are starting to appreciate. Simon Rogerson, one of the co-founders of Octopus Group, is among them. Octopus operates in a number of highly competitive fields and there is a risk its employees can end up paying the price.

“It’s up to us as a business to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Rogerson says. That’s why Octopus has begun giving its staff opportunities to gain psychological flexibility in workshops run by Archer for the firm. The results are still anecdotal, but the workshops are having an impact. “Feedback so far has been very positive,” Rogerson says. “Attendees tell us there’s a lot to be gained from standing up and talking about these things and also from hearing about the experiences of the other people in the room.”

Archer hopes this is the start of a shift towards better working environments across a range of sectors. “Giving people the power to solve their own work problems, and helping them to keep their long-term aspirations and values in sight: this is the future,” he says.

Find out more at: www.octopusgroup.com

This article appeared in print under the headline “How to beat workplace stress”

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