Stress. Just the word triggers anxiety. Human resources professionals well understand the toll stress can take on workers’ health and productivity, but is there a way to leverage stress so that it does more good than harm? Can a change in a stressed out employee’s mindset turn a worrisome experience into an exercise in personal growth? 
In a recent Harvard Business Review article, two researchers claim that despite its harmful aspects, stress has the potential to be good. And Brad Federman, chief operating officer of human resources consulting firm F&H Solutions, agrees to a point.
“Stress has many wonderful attributes,” Alia and Thomas Crum wrote in a September 3 article on the Harvard Business Review website. “It reminds us that we care; it connects us directly with the most challenging and important aspects of our lives. We aren’t suggesting that sustained stress does not take a toll, only that it can bring unexpected benefits, too, in the form of personal growth.”
The Crums—Alia is an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University, and Thomas is an author, seminar leader, and performance coach—advocate a three-step approach to turn stress to good: see it, own it, use it.
Seeing it refers to acknowledging rather than denying the stress an individual feels. Just acknowledging stress allows people to pause their “visceral reaction” and choose “a more enhancing response,” the article states.
Owning the stress “shows us that we care; that the stakes matter,” the article says. “Owning this realization unleashes positive motivation—because deep down we know that things that are important shouldn’t always come easy.”
Using stress means capitalizing on the body’s stress response. “Although the stress response can sometimes be detrimental, in many cases, stress hormones actually induce growth and release chemicals into the body that rebuild cells, synthesize proteins and enhance immunity, leaving the body even stronger and healthier than it was before,” the Crums write. “Researchers call this effect physiological thriving, and any athlete knows its rewards.”
Different kinds of stress
But before HR professionals turn into cheerleaders for stress, Federman says they need to examine the stresses employees face, and they need to be realistic about employer demands.
“I see a lot of stress in the workplace, more than a generation ago,” Federman says. Employers have benefited from stress by making changes that have resulted in increased productivity, but beyond a certain point the stress becomes too much. He says he knows of instances in which employers have taken budgets from the previous year, cut them, and still demanded more productivity.
Federman examines three different kinds of workplace stress:
- Persistent stress causes long-term anxiety that’s overwhelming. For example, employees at a company undergoing layoffs likely suffer from persistent stress, especially if they have no sounding board and support to get through the process. Employers should take steps to keep important relationships intact and take care of survivors of the layoffs.
- Event stress is less serious and shorter in duration than persistent stress. Event stress may occur when an employee’s workload is tolerable but not ideal. Employees may be able to leverage the stress caused by loss of a piece of business or pressure to meet numbers, but the organization bears some responsibility, too.
- Performance stress is short term and can be turned to the worker’s advantage. For example, employees stressed about a sales call or presentation can change their mindset to turn the stress into motivation. “You can either stress out about it or get excited about it,” Federman says. Instead of worrying that a customer won’t buy or the boss won’t like the presentation, employees can reframe the issue into something they can control. They can’t control who will buy a product or like a presentation, but they can make sure they’ve done their best and delivered the needed information.
As for being able to leverage stress into something positive, Federman says performance stress definitely can be used to an employee’s advantage, but if it is event stress and the employee doesn’t have support, it’s harder to make stress positive. Persistent stress is “really hard to leverage into something positive,” he says.
HR strategies
Federman says HR can work against the negative aspects of stress by providing training on how to address it. HR can work to create networks or conversations so they can monitor and support people in the workplace.
Federman says HR also can work to change an organization’s culture so that managers understand the importance of paying attention to stress levels. The effort should come from management, though, so that it’s not seen as being just something from HR.
HR also can encourage management to look at work that has little or no impact on the business so that employees can focus on what drives real value, Federman says. Too often reports are generated that aren’t used, and processes and procedures are continued because they’ve always been done.
“People are stressed because they have too much to do,” he says, and the companies that do better are the ones that say no to some things so they can say yes to others.
Technology a culprit
As one way of handling stress, Federman advocates teaching employees how to manage the demands technology creates. He says even though technology is meant to help people get their work done, it rarely reduces stress over the long term.
“Technology manages us more than we manage technology,” Federman says. For example, back when word processing was first introduced, people marveled at how much more work could be done with no more need to retype and laboriously correct mistakes. Then they realized they could get more work done with fewer people. Managers were no longer given as much administrative support, and layoffs resulted.
Federman says employers should encourage conversations about how technology affects the workforce. “We can’t solve a problem we haven’t admitted to.” He points to some organizations that have outlawed email after certain hours. Stress is created when people feel pushed to answer emails seven days a week and use their smartphones for work on vacation. People need time to decompress, he says. “That is truly an area we need to work on, how do we allow for decompression time?”