Dis-stress signals « A view from the Itica Window

Dis-stress signals

October 2009

Am I alone in this or have you been noticing people becoming less tolerant and more stressed with each other lately?

I’m not just talking about at work but also in shops (I’ve witnessed blue language in a local late night grocery store twice in the past few weeks) and in the street (people barging into me to get past) – the tolerance levels seem to be going down at the same rate as the pound against the Euro! As you can tell I’m assuming the stresses of the economic climate may be among the main contributing factors here. I’m not sure if I have the answers to these ills – apart from avoiding late night shopping and busy streets (!) but I can offer some thoughts on the way they seem to be affecting the typical workplace …

If you cast your mind back a year what we were all hearing from many companies was that they were “cutting deep to make sure they only had to cut back once”. This invariably meant cutting back on the easy targets both in terms of people (contractors, part time workers etc.) and projects (Project Bells & Whistles now just a distant memory).

For everyone who was happy to still be in a job and back in the office on Jan 2nd the reality soon presented itself – same “business as usual” workload with fewer people to do it – not a recipe for happiness! Now working at 110% is OK for a while but throw in a few curve balls like holidays and time-off for sick leave and the stress levels begin to show themselves in lots of ways – back-biting, shouting matches in meetings, playing “duck and pass” with issues, just to name a few of the ways that the behaviours come out.

So what’s the solution? Well maybe doing the work in the old way – as if you had the same staff levels – is one of the first things to look at (is there a phrase with “work smarter” in it here??) A bit of process re-engineering (small p, small e) and prioritisation always helps. There will be some parts of your process that can tick along with minimal input – so identify those and as long as they are not draining a major chunk of your resource pool leave well alone. Then use “measures” to work out where the pain is – measures in this context means quick indicators – things like customer complaints, incidents left open for too long, areas that repeatedly create failed changes. You know where the pain areas are already!

So now you’ve identified the places that you want to tackle, how do you go about it? The exact steps you will need to take are going to vary and will need some detail so I will expand on them another time….

Peter J Smith – Head of Process Improvement – Itica Consulting – September 2009

peter.smith@itica.co.uk

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