Brussels 27 July 2018
Stress is a serious workplace issue
One quarter of Europeans experience stress from work[1]. Stress is experienced when the demands from the work environment exceed the workers ability to achieve them or control them. Job insecurity throughout the economy (including increases in temporary and zero-hours contracts), plus increasing hours of work and workloads, excessive monitoring, accountability, performance management, target setting, badly-managed change and bullying management are all identified as causal factors. In both the private and public sector, jobs that involve working with the public have seen an increase in the emotional content of labour and in both sectors workers report an increase in harassment, violence and aggression all of which add more stress to workers. Overwork is also linked to stress, and increasingly invades more and more of workers personal lives leading more workers to report symptoms associated with burnout. Stress causes profound damage to the lives of workers and their families and can also be very expensive for business and for wider society (e.g. absentee rates and health care expenditure). (More)
