WorkLifeBridge

The latest edition of Complete Lawyer, an online publication on professional development, quality of life, and career issues that impact lawyers, covers an issue that any workplace — legal or otherwise — needs to pay attention to:  workplace bullying.

Why?  Because of the consequences it holds for workforce retention, productivity, company reputation, and employer liability.

“No Jerks Allowed!” features articles from workplace experts, including:

• “Yes, There Are Ways To Reform Workplace Jerks” by Allison West
• “Create A Blueprint For A ‘Bullying-Free’ Workplace” by Gary Namie
• “How To Spot And Deal With Jerks” by Julie Fleming-Brown
• “Power Breeds Nastiness” by Robert Sutton

What is your workplace doing to address workplace bullying?

In a recent poll by ComPsych, a provider of employee assistance programs (EAPs) and other workplace services, 60 percent of employees indicated that they have high levels of stress, manifested by extreme fatigue and a feeling of being out of control. Moreover, 42 percent said that they lose at least one hour or more per day in productivity due to stress, and 35 percent said that they lose 15 - 30 minutes per day. That’s a lot of productivity loss.

Put simply, if you run a company of 100 people, you’re losing about 46 hours of productivity from your employees due to stress every day.

How is productivity affected? For one, stress increases absenteeism. The same survey revealed that nearly half of employees don’t show up for work one or two days a year just due to stress, and another 30 percent miss three to six days for the same reasons. In addition, even when they do come to work, over half the survey participants indicated that they show up too stressed to be effective at their jobs one to four days a year, and another 20 percent put that figure at five days or more. Nearly two thirds of employees take frequent stress breaks to talk about issues with colleagues, and 83 percent come to work when they’re sick.

The scary thing is that most managers are unaware of the stress that their employees are feeling and may be ill-prepared to address it. Of the human resources managers surveyed, only 45 percent thought employees had a high level of stress. Moreover, over a third of employees surveyed cited people issues as their primary cause of stress, and 40 percent of those asked cited stress and personal relationship issues as a primary cause of absences.

Your employees’ stress is costing your company in productivity, and that translates to reduced profitability.

So what can you do about it? Forbes has an article on stress in the workplace, including a slide show of the ten best workplace stress relievers. Top among their tips were ideas such as physical exercise, fun and humor, building in slack to account for unexpected glitches, and simply bringing a healthy perspective when mishaps occur.

The Work Bloom Blog also has additional excellent suggestions for employees on dealing with stress in the work place. Companies that provide their employees with encouragement and opportunities to use these stress-relieving suggestions are doing both their employees and their bottom line a favor.

But since people issues are at the root of a great deal of stress, and since stress prevention is preferable to stress management, enhancing your employees’ people skills and increasing your company’s conflict management competence can have a profound effect on the stress that your employees are feeling. If the statistics in the ComPsych survey bear out, by helping people understand their own behaviors and deal better with those around them, you can reduce their stress level, improve morale, reduce absenteeism, increase productivity, and ultimately, be more profitable.

Here are some steps you can take:

• Make EAP and other referral services available for your employees to help them deal with life stresses external to the company.
• Provide training in negotiation, conflict resolution, communication, and other people skills to your employees, and particularly to your managers.
• Create both formal and informal dispute resolution processes and systems for your organization, and let people know how to access them.
• Treat employee complaints and behaviors seriously with respect. Make it safe for people to talk, and take effective action when warranted.

Americans are working harder than ever, according to a recent article posted at the Society for Human Resource Management web site. The article described a phone survey conducted by OfficeTeam, the California-based professional staffing service. This survey revealed that 42 percent of workers will not take any time off between Thanksgiving and New Year’s in 2007 beyond employer-provided time off, and 17 percent will only take one or two days off.

This means that nearly two thirds of employees intend on working without respite at a time of year when stress levels in both their work and home lives are at their peak. According to the survey, among office workers the situation is even more extreme, with only a quarter of employees taking time off, as organizations rush to complete end-of-year tasks.

As the stress level rises and the hours and days get long, tired people naturally get more impatient and testy around each other, and conflicts arise. Individuals experiencing this tension need help recognizing what is happening to and around them as well as support in managing stress and conflict in the workplace. Organizations that fail to address these issues proactively can experience a drop in morale and productivity, and some conflicts might escalate to levels that damage relationships for a long time past the holidays. Here are some steps you can take to prevent and manage work-related stress and conflict around the holidays:

• Give yourself and those around you a break. People in conflict are not at their best, and a little bit of empathy can go a long way.
• Encourage stress-relieving activities, such as exercise, games, walks, yoga, and others. Everyone has different pressure valves.
• Laugh - people lose their sense of humor when stressed.
• Communicate often and freely - stressed people hunker down and people in conflict stop talking altogether. This only makes things worse.
• Connect people with resources, internal and external to the organization, such as EAPs, ombuds, and others, to supplement what they can do on their own if the need arises.

For additional tips on managing stress at work during these times, here are a few articles worth exploring:

“Is your work stressing you? Find out the better way to deal with stress”

“Tips for Managing Stress and Change at Work: Stress Management Tips”

“Tips for Managing Stress: How to Slow Down in a High Speed World”

“Managing Stress“

“Managing Stress: Tips to Chill Out”

Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving and a wonderful holiday season.

It’s no secret that many people don’t like conflict.

Many organizations and managers don’t like conflict either. People prefer not to think about it and to continue working as if everything’s fine. But conflict is everywhere - sometimes overt, and sometimes hidden, in some cases healthy, and in others destructive - conflict is a normal part of people working side by side and making interdependent decisions.

Unacknowledged and unmanaged, conflict begins to eat away at relationships. People stop talking to each other and start a downward spiral of indifference, criticism, contempt, and hostility. By acting as if everything’s fine, people hope that conflict will just go away. Unfortunately, instead of going away, conflict escalates, reducing productivity, increasing absenteeism, contributing to attrition of employees, and potentially leading to legal troubles.

Conflict can start with a misunderstanding between two employees and escalate to a feud between two departments. Disgruntled employees might start whispering their discontent, fueling rumors, gossiping, wasting time, and spreading panic. It’s like global warming - the effects are so gradual that they may be hard to notice at first, but without giving people mechanisms and skills to communicate with each other and resolve their conflicts, the hidden costs of “everything’s fine” can escalate to a very painful sum.

So what to do? The idea is not to rid the workplace of conflict. Conflict is healthy for workplaces - in the give and take of disagreement, better ways of doing business emerge. Conflict clears the air and gets problems in the open.

Instead, managers can implement policies that encourage employees to speak up and provide training so people can learn how to confront and address conflict better.

Incidentally, if you’re curious to learn your own conflict style, you can take this online test.

You just can’t beat email for its ease, convenience, and speed.

Yet Dan Goleman, author of Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, describes the overlooked advantages that face-to-face communication has over the electronic kind in “Email Is Easy to Write (and to Misread)“, a recent article in the New York Times. Goleman observes,

Face-to-face interaction… is information-rich. We interpret what people say to us not only from their tone and facial expressions, but also from their body language and pacing, as well as their synchronization with what we do and say.

Most crucially, the brain’s social circuitry mimics in our neurons what’s happening in the other person’s brain, keeping us on the same wavelength emotionally. This neural dance creates an instant rapport that arises from an enormous number of parallel information processors, all working instantaneously and out of our awareness.

In contrast to a phone call or talking in person, e-mail can be emotionally impoverished when it comes to nonverbal messages that add nuance and valence to our words. The typed words are denuded of the rich emotional context we convey in person or over the phone.

And, as a result, email increases the likelihood that miscommunication and conflict will occur. In fact,

as the use of e-mail increases in an organization, the overall volume of other kinds of communication drops — particularly routine friendly greetings. But lacking these seemingly innocuous interactions, people feel more disconnected from co-workers. This was noted in an article in Organizational Science almost a decade ago, just as e-mail was starting to surge. Saying “Hi,” it turns out, really does matter; it’s social glue.

Does your organization rely heavily on email? If so, what does that mean for the quality of working relationships?

Personneltoday.com reports on a recent study of British workplaces which reveals how unprepared many organizations are to respond to or manage disputes:

A study … has found that nearly two-thirds of organisations do not educate staff on dispute avoidance, less than 30% update their policies in light of lessons learned from previous disputes, and only 38% of employers train staff in this area.

How prepared is your workplace?