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A Proactive, Personalised Approach To Stress Management
By Richard Adams MISMA, CCCReg, MCMA, MIGPP A Proactive Approach to Managing Stress Every UK organisation has some kind of stress management strategy. Even micro businesses that employ 10 or 20 staff often have a stress policy and may even have invited a local trainer in to deliver a talk or workshop about how to manage stress. Large corporations commonly provide an EAP (employee assistance programme) service alongside a range of occupational health and confidential counselling services that staff can benefit from on an as-needed basis. But all of the above services are more reactive than proactive in their nature. Indeed, most stress management interventions are by their nature only designed to be useful once stress has not only occurred, but is already causing detriment to the individual concerned's work and/or personal life. This reactive approach to stress management, whilst better than nothing, can cause a switchback effect, where individual members of staff or even overall teams can find themselves dipping into and out of crises, because each time stress occurs, it is not until it reaches crisis level that it gets dealt with. Far better for an organisation to help individuals take control of their lives through managing their wellbeing on an ongoing basis, regardless of whether or not they are suffering from high levels of stress at that time. Additionally, individuals and organisations can monitor for early signs of stress so that if symptoms start to increase, action can be taken early on to prevent a crisis from ever occurring. This proactive, dual responsibility approach that combines ongoing, individual involvement with corporate assistance is the best way to prevent stress "boom and bust" cycles. These cycles can cause considerable cost to both businesses and individuals in terms of lost health, reduced morale and decreased productivity. Mentoring and Coaching within Skills Development Before examining the role of mentoring and coaching in the management of stress, we should first consider how skills are generally developed within an organisation in order to see if this can be modelled for stress management. Generally speaking, an employee has a number of core tasks or duties that combine to make up their role and which they will be appraised for on a regular basis. Within the appraisal process, an assessment of their current strengths and weaknesses as related to each task or duty is usually undertaken, followed by the development of a personal action plan. The function of this plan is to help the employee to increase their productivity over the upcoming period until the next appraisal, where they will again be assessed and improvements noted. This plan may include some formal training in certain skills (for example prior to taking on a new task), but it is likely that by far the largest part of the assistance that they will receive is not delivered via formal training but from other sources of support, some (maybe even the majority) of which may not appear on the plan at all or even be recognised by the organisation as ever occurring. If formal training makes up only one small part of the overall picture of personal development, what makes up the remainder? The majority of development comes from day to day, on the job coaching and mentoring, from the practical and emotional support received from line manager and peer group and from the employee's own personal initiatives. If this is true of personal development in the core tasks that an employee is appraised for, formally trained in and specifically suited to performing due to their experience and qualifications, how much more is it true for those tasks that are not formally appraised for, that there is little or no formal training for and that may or may not be something that an individual employee knows much about or is particularly suited to performing? For an organisation to get serious about the provision of effective stress management interventions, it therefore needs to recognise that alongside formal training such as a half day or one day stress awareness classroom course, it must provide: a way for individual employees to assess their own current skills and circumstances relating to stress a level of ongoing practical and emotional support, coaching and mentoring to help individual employees reduce and manage their stress a mechanism for individual employees to monitor and record their progress Benefits of Online Self Service in Managing Stress The provision of personalised assessment, support, coaching, mentoring, monitoring and reporting for stress can be a costly and time consuming process, not least because it calls for a level of expertise around stress management not always found even within larger organisations. To implement the same level of individualised support in the same way for stress management as that which occurs naturally and organically for core tasks and duties would be both time and cost prohibitive for almost any organisation. But at the same time, the benefits of doing so would be enormous, as around one third of all sickness absenteeism is caused by stress* and indeed sickness absenteeism is now recognised to be just the visible tip of the iceberg compared with lost productivity due to presenteeism, which may account for 7˝ to 10 times greater lost productivity than sickness absenteeism†. One approach would therefore be to take this individualised support, create a process for it and make it available online for employees to access on a self service basis. The benefits of this can be described in terms of time, cost and quality of service. Time Benefits In terms of time, placing a complete support process for stress onto the Internet allows employees to access this service on a 24x7x365 basis, from work, from home, from hotels and even whilst on the move for those who use mobile devices with Internet access. This means that employees can gain access to the service either at the point of need (ie when they have a stress issue that needs resolving before they can return to productivity again) or in down time (ie without eating into precious productivity time that many employees are already stretching to its limits). From the organisation's perspective of course, this also means that the organisation as a whole becomes more productive as time is utilised more sustainably and profitably by its employees. Cost Benefits In terms of cost, the ability to have personalised, face to face stress management mentoring and coaching available to all staff at all times would be completely impractical, requiring an entire team of stress management professionals to be available for employees' use throughout the working day. The provision of face to face, personalised contact works well in the reactive model of stress management, where a crisis is either taking place or about to take place and where the cost of such a service is therefore prioritised to just those employees who require crisis intervention, but works badly for the proactive model of stress management where all employees are being provided with access to the service at all times. Putting the service online however, turns the financial model around. Whereas with face to face services, the development costs are relatively low and the implementation costs rise for each hour of service delivery, with online services the development costs account for almost all of the total costs, with very little costs involved in ongoing delivery. What is more, by teaming up with a service provider, organisations can take advantage of scales of economy to leverage greater value by effectively only paying for one small part of the overall service development costs. Quality Benefits In terms of quality, porting a personalised mentoring and coaching service to the Internet will of course change the dynamic for the individual receiving the service. What can be lost is the human interaction, emotional support and empathy that is sometimes present in a face to face coaching and mentoring session. However, not all coaching and mentoring manages to exhibit these qualities and in any case, employees would still have the capability to gain these qualities through interaction with their line manager, peer group and where necessary confidential counselling or other interventions available through HR or Occupational Health. What can be gained is the ability to ensure a consistently high standard of service, as every employee will receive access to exactly the same online process. Additionally, because of the electronic nature of online services, data is recorded and stored much more accurately and efficiently, making it far more simple and effective for both individual employees and the organisation itself to keep track of and make sense of their activities and progress. Finally, for some employees, talking face to face with a stress management professional, line manager or even a colleague about what may be quite personal issues relating to stress may be difficult or frightening for a variety of cultural, personal or work related reasons. The anonymity of interaction with a computer system instead may allow these employees to gain greater benefits than would otherwise be possible. *HSE Labour Force Survey 2007/8 †Cornell University Institute for Health and Productivity Studies Survey 2004 The Online Coaching Model for Stress Management The coaching service that is offered to employees to help them develop their capability to manage stress should follow the best practice model we have already examined for general skills development. This model involves a step by step approach as follows: assessment, planning, action and monitoring & recording. Assessment In this step, employees assess where stress is coming from both within and outside of work, the symptoms that they are experiencing from undergoing stress and the positive and negative coping strategies they are currently employing to attempt to manage that stress. The assessment should provide a comprehensive report that is simple to understand and that makes sense of the data to provide some level of advice and interpretation to the employee. Planning In this step, employees take the results from their assessment and build a personalised plan to combat the symptoms of stress that they are experiencing through the development of new coping strategies and through direct action to deal with root causes of the stressors that they have identified. This step requires help and assistance for the employee to understand what services and activities are available for them to undertake, to help them determine which of these services and activities would be most appropriate to meet their individual needs and circumstances and to prioritise their time and energy to ensure their most profitable use. Provision needs to be made both for the selection of on and offline activities and interventions that employees can either work through on their own (such as online self study training modules), attend in a group environment (such as classroom courses) or deploy for themselves (such as joining a health club or changing their diet) and for support for these activities (including diarising of events and automation of reminders). Action In this step, the employee needs to take action to address the issues indicated in the assessment step by following the plan created in the planning step. Taking action can require the overcoming of inertia and in some cases possibly fear, anxiety and other negative emotions. As such, employees need as much support as possible during the action step to help them overcome these negative emotions and make the changes that will bring them greatest benefit. Monitoring & Recording No project is complete without knowing whether it has fulfilled its original brief. This means that targets for success need to be defined and progress needs to be measured, tracked and reported on. The recording process needs to be flexible and simple to understand and the reports need to make sense of the data and provide some kind of feedback to the employee as to progress. Conclusion The provision of personalised coaching to help employees develop their stress management skills is not simple to achieve. By modelling the way in which general skills development takes place both formally (through the provision of assessment and classroom and/or self study training) and informally (through the provision of coaching, mentoring and emotional & practical support), an organisation will be able to expect the best possible results. Additionally, by modelling the process of skills development from assessment through to planning, action and monitoring & recording, employees will be more likely to achieve greater results. By placing stress management services online and providing them through a step by step, predefined process for employees to follow, an organisation simplifies the development of stress management skills, reduces the total cost of ownership, ensures uniform consistency of quality of service and provides maximum opportunity for success. About the Author Richard Adams is the Managing Director of Inner Physique Ltd, a company he set up to deliver online and face-to-face stress management services and support to UK organisations. Inner Physique's customers include charities, not for profit organisations, local authorities, technology companies, colleges, entrepreneurial startups and many more. Richard has been a qualified complementary therapist since 1989 and has been involved in counselling and therapeutic treatment since that time. Richard is a full member of the International Stress Management Association, the International Guild of Professional Practitioners and the Complementary Medical Association. He is also a member of the charity "Counselling" and is signed up to their "counsellor's code of conduct" charter. Richard's organisation's web site can be visited at www.innerphysique.com and he can be contacted by email at richard.adams@innerphysique.com or by telephone on 0845 299 7110. 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