Far from being symptomatic of a glamorous, high-flying career, high stress levels in the workplace can seriously affect recruiters’ performance.
Recruiters often wear their stress like a campaign medal, taking pride in coping with long hours, demanding clients and impossible targets. Stress is the classic evolutionary response to a crisis ‘fight or flight’. Unfortunately, there are few office situations these days that can be resolved by punching someone in the face or running away.
Subjecting oneself and one’s colleagues to extreme levels of stress is not a shortcut to superhuman achievement, but a receipt for poor business performance, employee burnout, ill health and even death. ‘Stress clogs up the arteries, wrecks the immune system, and can lead to diabetes, rheumatism, and even cancer,’ warns John Clark of Stress Consultancy Northwest.
In the short term, the symptoms of stress show in staff performance: ‘People who have the reach targets consistently are under a lot of stress,’ says Clark. ‘They become poor at time management, skip meals or overeat. They stop doing things they like doing and become absorbed in their work, working longer hours and taking work home at the weekends. But the longer you work, the less you achieve.’
High pressure environments like recruitment offer such from ‘presenteeism’ the desire to put in lots of face time at the offer whether one is being productive or not. Unfortunately, says Clark, the human body can’t deliver top-level performance throughout 14-hour day: performance peaks between 8 and 10:30am and 3:30 and 6pm, and picks up again at 8pm, ‘by which time you should be doing something you enjoy doing’.
People who drive themselves all day to achieve impossible goals should be aware that en taking a couple of minutes off each hour will dramatically improve their performance. ‘We don’t take breaks any more,’ Clark observes. ‘We live in this macho culture where only wimps take lunch, or you have lunch at the computer, or in your car.’
However, tackling stress does not mean turning every workplace into a tranquillised love-in. ‘Stress can be the thing that gets us moving to respond to a challenge. If you have too little pressure you can get ‘rust-out’ where you’re stressed out by boredom. There’s an optimal level that’s manageable: if you go past that, the energy levels it takes to sustain your previous performance are so great, you go into the cycle of never having enough energy.’
De Valk stressed that individuals should take responsibility for managing their own stress lvels, while acknowledging that it often takes a lot of courage to approach one’s manager and say ‘I’m stressed’. Manager have a duty to look out for signs of stress in the workplace, such as working longer hours, excessive tiredness, sudden weight gain or loss, and irritable behaviour.
Managers can help by recognising their own status as role models and changing the cultural drivers in the office. ‘You can make it a badge of honour to take all your holidays,’ says de Valk. ‘Don’t consider people heroes if they work long hours. Revers that and ask: what are you still doing here at 8:30, there must be something wrong.’
Hard-nosed recruiters may find all this a bit touchy-feely, but de Valk stressed that there is a solidly business case behind stress management. ‘I don’t think any organisation has done this out of the goodness of their hearts,’ she says. ‘There’s a business problem that shows itself in different ways: they can’t seem to bring women through to senior positions, they’re struggling to recruit graduates, staff turnover is high.’
Still no convinced? Michael Stewart, founder of the Centre for Crisis Psychology, deals with the extreme incidents: ‘”We come at stress from a very extreme angle, dealing with people at work who have experienced bank robberies, physical attack, or murders or suicides of colleagues’. However, he says, the reactions in these scenarios are often very similar to those experienced by people in ‘normal’ offices.
‘The stress landscape is similar, but it’s more drip than flood – it’s like Chinese water torture,’ he says. ‘In the work situation people are very frightened of showing any kind of vulnerability.’
Long-term solutions
There are a lot of practioners in the stress management world, ranging from highly qualified chartered psychologists to New Age merchants of dubious efficacy. The International Stress Management Association is a good place to start when looking for an expert, and is currently working on a professional validation scheme. President Carole Spiers, of Carole Spiers Associates, points out that stress management is no a ‘quick fix’.
‘It’s all very well doing a stress audit,’ she says, ‘ but once you’ve identified the hot spots you need to put support systems in place. There are a lot of people out there who purport to be able to change your life overnight, but stress is a life cycle skill, it must be learned.’
Not is it simply a case of sending the staff off to be ‘distressed’, or fixing the organisation – bosses also need to monitor their own stress levels. However, as David Newth of the Millfield Consultancy point out, high-achieving individuals are often the last ones to admit that they are as vulnerable to stress as anyone else.
‘I wish I had a pound for every time someone had said to me: “I never thought stress would get me”,, he says. ‘It’s very easy not to be aware that one is behaving in a peculiar way, but it’s obvious to other people that you’re running around like a headless chicken. One of the symptoms is that your judgement becomes impaired: when you’re making recruitment decision that affect people’s lives and businesses that’s very serious.’
It is possible to maintain this state of denial for a long time but, says Newth: ‘When they fall they fall with a hell of a bump’. One day they are terribly motivated, and the next they wake up and pull the covers over their head because they just can’t face it any more. Then it’s no good just taking a couple of day off – it will take a lot of time and be very expensive.’
Stress can be tackled, but it’s even better to head it off. Recruitment is always going to be a tough job, and one needs to make sure that one’s employees are prepared for it. Nyasha Poe of online workplace consultancy Friendly Ear says that a lot of the calls she takes from recruiters relate not to the workplace but to their work with candidates: ‘A lot of recruiters have no counselling skills themselves, but end up dealing with candidates’ personal lives,’ she reports. ‘You may just want a CV, but you have to take on the person as a whole. A lot of their anxiety is about whether they have the skills to do the job.’
Taking this process a step further, the ultimate question is whether they are indeed the right person – and recruitment agencies can sometimes be a little indiscriminate in their own recruitment. Vernon Bryce of human capital management firm Kenexa believes that a lot of stress comes from a poor fit between employees and their roles.
‘Our research shows that by the time stress arrives it’s too late,’ he says. ‘I feel quite sad for people who end up having to sue their employers haven’t fitted them properly to their job.’