Combating Workplace Stress

People know that an employee's problems at home often carry over to the workplace. And that workplace woes can make our home life miserable. But it's actually a vicious circle,often started by workplace stress, which then aggravates problems at home and boomerangs back to the job site and makes a bad situation worse. This interrelationship and the domino effect on productivity shows a chain of effects that begin with job demands, continues with job spillover at home, and then to diminished job performance.

The quality of life at work is very important to employee satisfaction. But at times of economic uncertainty, many people are lucky to have any kind of a job, thus compounding the situation. Often people will tolerate abusive bosses that in better times they would dump and walk out of the job. Often managers will schedule a conference at the end of the workday, the time when people are tired and longing to go home. It's very difficult to compartmentalize your life. People say they leave their personal life behind when they come into work or leave the work life behind when they go home, but it's not really doable.

This questions the wisdom of employers spending more money on human resources on family-related activities such as child care. without trying to reduce job related problems. This generally treats people's personal problems as products of their time off work, and unrelated to their jobs. Instead, it is the work experience that causes many an employee's personal problems.

Helping employees to solve problems in their personal lives, without also reducing the extent to which jobs contribute to the problem, limits the impact of work-life programs on company productivity.