Cranfield School of Management
Interview: Professor Kim Turnbull-James
Energising the Workplace: A Strategic Response to Stress
SM
Hello, this is Steve Macaulay of the Learning Services Team, and I am
interviewing Professor Kim Turnbull-James about her book Energising
the Workplace – A Strategic Response to Stress, that she wrote with
Tanya Aroba. Now I guess one of the first things that we should do is
have a look at what we mean by stress. There are so many articles, so
many definitions. I think it would be helpful if we start there.
KTJ
I think that is right. I think people use the word stress when they mean I
am having a bad hair day, and that is certainly not how we would use the
word stress at all. Perhaps I can explain it this way, if we think about the
kind of pressures that we are under then they are cumulative as we go
through a day, a week, a month. So the sorts of pressures that I might
experience would be things like the washing machine breaking down, the
commuter traffic that I have to put up with on my way to work, when I
get to work I find that I have got fifty e-mails, even though I did all the
ones I could last night, I have then got a very full diary. So if I add all of
these sorts of things up, we could imagine some notional level of pressure
that I would experience. Now some of those pressures I would know
exactly how to deal with them, so I know how to deal with e-mails; and
other pressures might come along in the course of the day and I don’t
know how to do them. They are really stretching – so maybe I have to
give a big presentation to four hundred people and I am not used to doing
that – so we could add this notional level of pressure up. And one of
things that we believe is that pressure is actually very good for you, and
actually quite a lot of people – they like a lot of pressure – and
particularly when we look in the workplace at people in professional and
managerial jobs, they enjoy pressure and very few people like very low
pressure jobs in the sense of having very little to do. So if you can
imagine a job where you are clockwatching, there isn’t enough going on,
that is pretty gruesome. So what we think of pressure is: if you like a
notional level of pressure, if the pressure is too much for you, then you
will end up feeling stressed, but conversely if the pressure is too low for
you, you will feel stressed. So it is about getting the right amount of
pressure for you, that keeps you ready and energised. That is why the
book is called Energising the Workplace because when the pressure is
right you will get out of bed thinking I have got a really exciting job to go
to, I don’t mind the traffic too much, things look good, I am really going
to enjoy it, lots of things, people I want to meet, things I want to do – and
that is what we want from people in the workplace. So this is a really
important thing.
We are not talking about getting rid of pressure when we are trying to
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manage stress. Stress is when it is wrong.
Now of course the second thing about that is that it is quite individual.
So I mentioned just now about making a presentation to four hundred
people. For some people they make a living doing it, so we must assume
that they quite like it. For others it is not something that they would
want to do and they would probably run a mile from, if they got a chance.
So what actually constitutes pressure is different and the amount of
pressure that we enjoy is different. And that is why for managers in
managing people it is quite a hard task because it is not a set level, it is
not that you just ask people to work their set number of hours in the
week, or that you simply don’t give people difficult tasks. Actually
getting it right is difficult.
SM
Now, one of the interesting things about your book is that you are
addressing it at senior managers, people who have got responsibility in
organisations for both the stress that is created and maybe reducing it and
I notice in the book that you said stress management initiatives
commonly fail – I would be quite interested to hear your take on stress
management.
KTJ
Well, I think there has been a lot of very, very good things that are being
done on stress management and if we were to go back thirty years we
would find that stress was something that was barely talked about and
was almost a shameful thing to talk about and we went through that and
came out the other side with recognising that stress affects performance.
So the key thing here is that there is a relationship between stress and
performance.
So going back to the pressure that I just talked about, very low level
pressure, you also get low levels of performance, very high levels of
pressure you get low levels of performance. So, we understand that and
that is why I think that organisations have been willing and anxious in
fact, to take on stress management initiatives. Now the focus originally
then became from not talking about stress at all, began to talk about stress
in individuals – and there was some very good work being done helping
people to manage their pressure levels by focusing on personal strategies
– so how they think about their work, how they frame problems, fitness,
diet, all those sorts of things, which are really important. In addition
organisations began to realise that those individuals needed support and
often would offer employee assistance programmes – stress counselling
and so on – which helps individuals, so that’s an organisational initiative,
but it’s still aimed at individuals.
Now, I don’t say that we shouldn’t be doing those things, those are really
important and they are vital for people who have not been able to cope in
the working environment. But the problem is – and if I could use this
analogy – what you are doing with those kind of stress training initiatives
is twofold: first of all, you are patching people up, that is really all you
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are doing and you are sending them back into exactly the same working
environment as the one that created the stress in the first place. So my
analogy is that this is almost like setting up a mobile army hospital – a
MASH unit – and so you send people to the MASH unit and you sort
them all out and then you send them back to the front. The opposite
strategy would be diplomatic negotiations which end the war. And so I
think when we come to talk about organisational strategies, strategies for
managing the workplace stress, then we need to think about those more
diplomatic and strategic issues rather than just simply patching people up.
So that is the first thing – we have people who are being patched up and
they are being sent back into a potentially toxic environment and in fact
some of the cases where organisations have been taken to court over
stress in individuals it has been because an individual has been stressed,
they have had time off, they have come back to work and nothing in the
workplace has changed and they have been stressed, maybe had a heart
attack or something serious again and it is the second time when it is
obvious that the organisation should have taken care of them that is really
the problem.
But the second problem that we create by thinking about stress just as an
individual issue, is that in a way it pathologises the individual. It makes
them the source of the problem and the message, even when it is really
well intentioned, if the individual can do something about stress – and the
individual is the focus of that responsibility – it’s up to them to learn how
to manage the stressful environment that they are in as if they could fix
their personality and somehow or other they would stop feeling stressed.
And I think that there is a problem there, and I think it is unethical to
indicate, whether you intend to or not, by simply focusing on individual
stress, that the organisation has no responsibility when clearly it has and I
would like to give you a couple of very practical examples of what I
mean by this.
I was talking with a manager a number of years ago now, but the story
remains very clearly in my mind and he was worried about one of the
people who was working for him. This was an individual who he
thought was a very tough cookie, he described the woman in this job as a
very tough individual, come from a tough working background, was well
known for being very competent, a very go-getting person, but she had
been signed off work with stress. And when we started to talk about this,
because he was asking should he seek counselling for her or some
individual help, and when he started to talk about this he remembered that
the person who had the job before this woman had actually been taken
out of the workplace because of long-term illness which had had stress as
one of its contributory factors and that individual was somebody who you
would think was quite tough, he was an ex fighter pilot. Now these
people were in a credit control job and in their job they were right on the
boundary between some of the pressures from some of the senior
executives who wanted the sales force to go out and sell, sell, sell at any
cost and obviously a member of the financial constraint on selling to
people who maybe were less creditworthy than other customers needed to
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be. And they were really almost like a channel, a focal point for some of
those pressures in the organisation and I don’t think any amount of stress
counselling would have helped that ex fighter pilot or the current woman
that he was talking about who was suffering stress. The organisation
needed to address the issues around that.
SM
I think that is where I start to say, well this is all very well for us sitting in
a School of Management, but when you are managing a call centre, for
example, when you are a senior manager in Northern Rock, both of those
examples say well, what can I do about this? This is a situation that I
can do very little about.
KTJ
Well, I don’t accept that you can do very little about it. Let me give you
another situation. This was a large organisation that we worked with,
with 35,000 employees and the senior managers that we worked with – I
should say at the outset this is one of my less successful pieces of
consultancy, but I think it has an interesting story to tell. So, the senior
managers brought us in and we did some very good work, I think, with
the senior team and they began to look at some of things that were putting
pressure on themselves, some of the things that they were passing round
the organisation and some of the things that were important initiatives
that were going to cause a whole lot of problems for individuals. And so
there was recognition that anxiety in the organisation would be quite
high.
There was a threat of people losing their jobs, people being re-organised,
having to apply for their own jobs again – a scenario that is fairly familiar
to us. So then we began to work with the regional managers and the idea
is that in each part of the organisation you can begin to look at well, What
are some of the things that we ought to be doing that would make this
easier? Can we talk to people about their experience? Can we take
away some of the jobs that we seem to be doing for no apparent reason,
you know, or some of bureaucracy that would mean that we have more
energy available for these changes? So you can often, if you look very
closely at an organisation, find ways of alleviating some of the problems
or beginning to address them in a more productive way so that people
have better channels of communication. Now this doesn’t take away the
problems and remember when I said at the moment that stress is not
caused by having no problems, it’s caused by having too many, so by
taking away some things or managing some things better, you can get
people’s pressure levels at a level that they can cope more proactively
with all of these challenges.
So we were beginning to work our way through the management
structure and at some point the organisation decided that what they
needed was something that hit 35,000 employees and we argued that it
was actually better to be continuing working with the managers, looking
at what you could do in different parts of the system that would improve
things for people. However, a view was taken that it was politically
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appropriate to do a computer program that went to every single person’s
desktop computer which diagnosed their health, gave them a stress read
out and told them some things that they could do. So that is what they
did and they paid a lot of money for that program and it went to 35,000
people. The response in the organisation was sheer fury. So the
intention was very positive – we want to help people, we know there is a
problem – by passing the problem, as the employees felt it was passed to
them, that they had something on their desktop that would help them
diagnose their stress – I mean, they knew if they were stressed or not –
and then give them some kind of readout on this and then make the
solution to the stress problem one that they had to adopt on their own, or
address on their own, and they have a very, very furious response to that
initiative. So, well intentioned, badly implemented.
SM
So it seems as though one of the things that you would say is that senior
management need to be aware that some of their actions could cause
stress and also to listen very carefully to the responses that they are
getting and to pick up the signals and do something with those.
KTJ
Yeah, I think the important thing is to be picking up the signals and to be
doing something with them. So although in the book, we do I think later
on, talk about doing stress audits, there does seem to be a view that by
auditing something and acknowledging that it is there, that is an action
that has been taken or it’s a diagnosis – a bit like diagnosing somebody’s
learning needs and saying yes, yes they have got these learning needs and
then moving on to another agenda. So I think that we do need to think
about interventions and I think that the interventions are many and it’s
not something that you can immediately just provide a set of simple tools
for. But I think that once managers do have stress management on their
agenda and they recognise that it is a problem in the organisation, and
they begin to find ways of surfacing the problems and listening to what
people are doing, then changes happen. And I think that when you
collectively do that, you create change.
So let me just talk about another assignment that I had with an
organisation which had a very, very positive reputation for looking after
its employees, quite rightly so. I mean it really does take care of people.
It is very positive, it’s a very can do organisation. It expects a lot of
people, but they also expect teamwork, respect and so they were quite
shocked to find that they had problems with stress when they did their
employee opinion surveys. I went in to work with one group of people
and we found that there were real concerns, concerns about some of the
ways they were being managed, but concerns about some of the pressures
in the job and I went to do interviews with twenty people. Now I went
with a kind of researcher hat on – I wanted to find out what the problems
were and wanted to understand them more from an individual perspective
and in a confidential way. So I went in with a notepad and pencil and I
interviewed each one of these twenty people in the department for about
an hour and all I did was to listen and I wrote it all down and I listened
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and I wrote it all down and I filled up pad after pad and I listened and I
wrote it all down. And then, being a good researcher, I went away. I did
an analysis of all the data I collected and I went back to make my
presentation to the head of the department. When I went in to do the
presentation, and he said I don’t know what you are doing here really, we
have solved all the problems ourselves. And I think it is a very
interesting process – by actually speaking about the problems to me,
people owned what was going on. They went out of the interviews with
me and talked to each other and by the time I went back they had
reorganised various desks, they had got a way of organising it so that
people got less interruptions but they had an information desk which was
constantly staffed, so anybody coming in could have a conversation with
people. They had worked out some things that they needed to do at their
weekly meetings that enabled people to keep up to date and process some
of the things that were going on. So yes, he was quite right. It appeared
that I was redundant, but actually the process of talking about and
understanding what was going on collectively was what shifted and that
is what I mean by changing the system.
SM
So, one of the things that you say in your book is that you need to tailor
any stress management strategies to the organisation and I guess that is an
example really where people were saying what do we need to do here and
some of that is in response to the people concerned, like move the desks.
KTJ
Yes, absolutely. And I think if you get a group of people together and
get them to talk about their experience, people will recognise that
organisations are going through change, they will recognise that there are
– whether they like them or not – that there may be a need for
reorganisation, downsizing, all sorts of things which there is no way that
we would say that somebody losing their job can be resolved by
reorganising the desks, so let’s be clear about that. But in organisations,
if you can imagine that what you are trying to do, if you like, is let off
enough steam, let off enough pressure so that people can resolve the
issues and deal with them as best they can, you will find immense
creativity and resourcefulness in actually creating a more workable
environment. But if it is not talked about, it’s not processed, there isn’t a
manager who is willing to think about this, or people don’t understand, or
they feel that it is a failure of themselves as individuals because they are
feeling stressed, then of course you don’t get any of those positive
energising responses to periods of high pressure.
SM
Now I noticed in your book one of the things you are not in favour of is
HR owning such initiatives.
KTJ
Let’s be clear, I have no downers on HR; that is not the case and I think
quite clearly HR practitioners have a lot of expertise that they can bring.
But, they will be the first people themselves to say that their role is not to
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line manage and their role is to work with strategy, getting the right
people into the right places in the organisation, supporting the business
strategy. And one of the problems that any organisation will have with
any aspects of HR is when they want to hive it off to the HR people to
make them responsible for something that actually is a function of the
whole way that organisation is working – or not working. So whilst I
would certainly not wish to exclude people in HR, I would say that if
your senior managers, and in fact your managers throughout the
organisation, are not wanting to get engaged then you might as well not
bother. Just hiving it off to HR is, and saying they will sort it – yes, they
will do you a stress survey, yes, they will propose some stress
management programmes, or maybe they put together an EAP
programme for you, but they cannot come in and do a line manager’s job,
and I don’t think I have met any HR practitioners who would want to, or
think that it was their job to do so.
SM
When I read your book, one of the things that struck me was that you
talked about stress being catching in an organisation, about things that go
on at an unconscious level, about emotions in the organisation and it
struck me really, well how is an average manager meant to spot all these
things and deal with them?
KTJ
Well, I think that just acknowledging that this is possible is a starting
point because there is a myth, which I think has been really broken now,
but a myth organisations are rational places. And I think that anybody
who has experienced an organisation as a manager, member of staff or
whatever capacity they have been in an organisation, they know that
organisations are hotbeds of emotional activity, political activity and that
is what’s exciting and that is why we go to work, and lots of social
arrangements at work take this into account.
I think, in terms of stress, what I think is important for managers to
recognise is that if you directly ask people: Are you stressed or are you
feeling anxious?, many people will quite honestly say, No I’m not feeling
anxious, or, No I am really happy about the change, or, I am really
excited about it. What I think that we can see though, is that
organisations go through periods, particularly when there is a lot of
change around or a new direction, new leaders, uncertainty, where there
is a high level of what I would call organisational anxiety and that
becomes manifest in all sorts of interesting ways and some people may be
the, if you like, the channel, the lightning rod for that more than others,
but that doesn’t mean to say that it is them as individuals who are the
stress problem. It’s actually in the whole system, so a whole system can
be quite nervous when there is a new leader on the way, a whole system
can be quite nervous when the City is nervous and that actually will raise
people’s anxiety levels whether or not they pay attention to that. And I
think it is important that managers at least acknowledge that and not take
at face value most people go to work and want to look good and there is
the old proverbial, apocryphal maybe, image of the gliding swan and the
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little legs underneath paddling hard to keep the swan going. And I think
that people in organisations feel like that – they look good on the surface,
they are worried about how much energy they are putting in to keep
themselves that way.
So I think managers need to pay attention to it and even in organisations
which are very positive organisations, that take a lot of time and care over
their staff, there are still all these things going on. There are
competitions, there are rivalries, somebody got promoted and somebody
didn’t, somebody got praised and somebody didn’t and although we don’t
usually go to the coffee machine and talk about our envy or our jealousy
or competitiveness, it is there in organisations. We need to find ways of
letting people talk about their work experience appropriately.
SM
So, if you were to give people in an organisation at a managerial level
some advice, and I know there is always a danger of being over
simplistic, but what would you say from the book that you can pass on to
these managers?
KTJ
Well, I think there are a number of things. I mean, first of all most
managers and in fact most people who go to work, want to feel the
organisation is an exciting, energetic place to be and I think for managers
it is one of their responsibilities to create an environment in which people
can give their best. That is where they are going to give their best
performance and that is one of the duties of a manager, to create that.
Now, I think that in order to do that, it is important that managers do
recognise that just what we have been talking about, the organisation isn’t
a rational place and people don’t leave their feelings at the door when
they park the car and when they do come to work there are all sorts of
things which are going to unnerve them, as well as excite them and I
think if managers were to think then about what we need to do to take
care of people as they enter into uncertain territory, then that would be
the starting point really.
Then, of course, there are lots of strategies and tactics, and tips and things
that you can give people, but I think it is really just taking that as a really
important part of the job, not as an added extra. It’s not something that
you do when you have done everything else, it’s part of performance
management.
SM
Now, we talked about stress management developing over the last thirty
years from a fairly low base. If we look ahead to the next period in the
future, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the way things are going to
go in way of managing stress?
KTJ
I think things will change and already I think people are talking. I am
quite glad we didn’t just term the book something about stress and
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energising the workplace because I think language changes and we are
beginning to see work and wellbeing as being the phrases, and perhaps
they have a more positive spin on them than stress. So I think that we
are going to see still an emphasis on that and quite rightly so because
stress or lack of wellbeing costs the country and every company a lot of
money when people are away from work because they can’t work. I
think we are going to see changes. We are going to see different ways in
which the workplace is experienced by people and so already we are
seeing that people work in virtual teams in many cases, flexible working
will mean that there is more remote working and there are both positive
aspects to that and less positive aspects. So we see that one of the
problems, I think, that is coming up is that if people work from home,
even when they have a dedicated office space, it is much harder to switch
off. And in fact, one of the studies that we did demonstrated that for
many people there is a process of, if you like, disrobing from their role in
their organisation, so many people will get to the tube station and they
will loosen their tie and they will turn off their work mobile phone or
they will do some things that actually tell them it is the end of the
working day. If you work at home, much harder to do that. I think with
globalisation many people find it very difficult to switch off at weekends
because they know the e-mails are still coming. Monday morning, you
wonder what on earth people are doing sending you e-mails on Saturday
and Sunday, so there is temptation to keep working – the working hours
of the day similarly affected. So I don’t think this is something that we
are going to get on top of, or should give ourselves a bad time because we
haven’t got on top of it. Keeping the pressure right for ourselves and
making sure that we have a culture in which the pressure is right for
people in the organisation – we can’t get it right all of the time and we
will constantly need to learn as the workplace changes. There is no one
static point at which we can say, hah, we have got six strategies, got them
all in place, job done. It’s not like that, it’s a dynamic world and our
responses are going to have to match.
SM
Thank you very much indeed, that’s very interesting.
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