The High Price of Stress…
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According to the American Institute of Stress:
Stress costs American businesses more than $300 billion dollars per year.
Stress accounts for as much as 90% of medical appointments.
Stress is a key factor in many voluntary resignations.
Adecco’s latest Workplace Insights Survey indicates that:
More than half (54%) of employed Americans report that they are likely to look for new jobs once the economy turns around.
Your youngest employees, who bring new ideas and skills to the workplace, are knocking on your competitor’s door. Of the employees surveyed, 71% between the ages of 18 and 29 are likely to look for new jobs once the upturn begins.
According to a survey conducted by the National Life Insurance Company, those in high stress jobs are three times more likely than others to suffer from stress-related medical conditions and are twice as likely to quit. The study states that women, in particular, report stress related to the conflict between work and family.
Using an example from the health care industry, Cascio (2000) calculated that the cost of replacing 288 employees per year (in a hospital with 200 beds employing 1200 persons with a turnover rate of 2% per month) was $2,888,295.52 when all sources of costs were analyzed.
According to a new cost of employee turnover analysis from the Employment Policy Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based research group, average turnover costs reached $13,355 per full-time private-sector worker in 2004. The result is based on an earlier study that found turnover costs average 25 percent of a worker’s annual salary.
The work-life balance quandary
Work-life balance is a hot topic in many corporations these days…
The recent economic ups and downs have pushed corporations to be leaner and more efficient than ever. Shareholders are driving companies to perform under the current harsh business environment and this is driving increased hours, increased responsibilities, and little in the way of material rewards.
This increased productivity, if not carefully watched, can have a price. Many employees are “constantly connected” with laptop computers, cell phones with email, and pagers. Employees working longer hours in this tough economic climate, especially where layoffs have impacted their co-workers or family, can become anxious and distracted.
The results of a demanding work environment can be:
lower effective productivity
increased health care costs (physical and psychological health)
a negative working atmosphere affecting job and customer satisfaction
turnover, as quality employees look for change or “greener pastures”
Forward-thinking companies are trying to improve their work environments through:
flexible hours
partial tele-commuting options
hotline services for personal assistance
other top down benefits
While these are important and truly beneficial programs, they require middle management to embrace them in the face of constant pressure to deliver business results. These programs are also typically focused on a simple “work-life” paradigm with “two” competing priorities—the employee’s work and “personal life.”
In fact, there are many priorities and employees can be stressed by competing personal priorities like; a dying parent and managing a single parent household with young children. These two items have nothing to do with work and, this person may like the distraction that work offers. However, they are very personal stressors that work is usually not equipped to support.
Make Today Matter can help and can be implemented quickly as a bottom up strategy, providing the tools to support work-life balance and employee personal priority planning. It will give your employees the support they need to effectively evaluate their life priorities and implement strategies to achieve balance amongst those priorities.
Benefits of the MTM program are:
Employees are given access to the tools to help them evaluate their priorities.
Employees are able to step back from their daily routine and reflect on personal stressors.
Employees have access to short, action-oriented mini-classes to improve life areas that they deem important.
Employees have access to an online community, that is safe and private, to share thoughts with others looking to achieve similar objectives.
With more than 120 total course offerings plus the priority planning toolbox, Make Today Matter is designed to help people articulate, evaluate and rank their priorities. It is a powerful set of tools that can be used to help people deal with life’s complexities in the 21st century.