In many arts organizations, stress and exhaustion are worn like badges of honor…public evidence that you’re giving your all to the cause. Of course, the downside is that once you’ve given everything, the cause is out of luck.
So, it’s great when individual organizations recognize the value of balancing stressors in the workplace where they can. And it’s even nicer when entire countries decide to encourage their businesses to do that, too.
Case in point: Britain’s Health & Safety Executive (HSE), a project supported by the Department of Work and Pensions, which was burning the midnight oil last year to develop management standards for dealing with stress in the workplace. All the goodies live on their stress issues homepage, if you’re a closet human resources wonk.
For the rest of us, the standards have distilled work-related stress management into six key areas that seem to drive stress levels on the job, which are:
- Demands — Includes issues like workload, work patterns and the work environment.
- Control — How much say the person has in the way they do their work.
- Support — Includes the encouragement, sponsorship and resources provided by the organisation, line management and colleagues.
- Relationships — Includes promoting positive working to avoid conflict and dealing with unacceptable behaviour.
- Role — Whether people understand their role within the organisation and whether the organisation ensures that they do not have conflicting roles.
- Change How organisational change (large or small) is managed and communicated in the organisation.
The first three areas relate to the content of the job, and the standards recommend that 85 percent of employees respond positively to questions about these elements of their work (there’s an ‘indicator tool‘ — ie, survey — on the site, along with instructions on how to use it). The second three areas relate to the context of the job, and the standards recommend that 65 percent of employees respond positively to questions about these (since the research isn’t quite as compelling as the first batch).
There’s even a handy seven-page overview of the standards, with definitions and goals for each of the six areas above (available in pdf format).
Of course, no organization will ever be stress free, and nonprofit arts organizations do thrive on the mad dash to opening night, the adrenaline of working with sparse resources, and the buzz of making something new and connecting it with a community. But there’s a difference between necessary intensity and flat-out, unproductive, passion-crushing stress.
It’s an artful manager that understands the balance. Thanks to the HSE for providing some tools to do so.
NOTE: Also a special thanks to Nora Spinks, President of Work-Life Harmony Enterprises in Toronto, who mentioned these standards in her recent keynote speech at the same conference I spoke to earlier this month.
