Companies with high demands and time restraints can sometimes lead to employees suffering from occupational stress.
Occupational stress is most common in competitive industries where employees must meet certain targets or goals. Employees who struggle with their workload or to reach the targets set become in fear of being demoted or fired. This has led to a number of people suffering from health and stress related issues and in very extreme cases employees have been known to commit suicide.
Former Deputy CEO of France Telecom, Louis-Pierre Wenes believes that employers who do not offer support and encouragement but instead continue to discriminate employees are those who create a stressful environment.
Even at the recruitment process, candidates are bombarded with a list of demands. Candidates must meet the personal specifications set by the employer, otherwise they will not even get within an inch of the job.
“My first target was to understand when I was recruiting somebody if these people were good, imaginative people and trying also to understand if their skills would match the size of the future organization,” Wenes says.
The pressure is on from the start. Successful candidates are then pressurised to fit in with the company’s qualities even if they are not in their nature. Companies who are target and goal-focused often have to work under pressure and be ruthless which many employees cannot deal with.
Wenes believes he has created the perfect balance between the pressure of those targets and employee satisfaction. “What I was asking from my people was do the best you can. So, in one sort I was saying don’t care about the goals,” he says.
Wenes wants more employers to be less interested in goals and more interested in personal development. As a result, there shouldn’t be a conflict between employee satisfaction and targets, “because if you make people understand, they will use their time in the best way.”
Louis-Pierre Wenes experienced a devastating period in 2009 at France Telecom, when there were 24 employee suicides over a period of 18 months. These shocking statistics emphasise the dangers of occupational stress.
Although Wenes admits more could have been done to prevent these terrible acts, he insists France Telecom had been doing a lot of things even before these suicides came into the media. “We put in place cells with doctors in the different regions of France almost 18 months before, so it would be unfair to say that France Telecom was totally to blame.”
Wenes admits that one thing France Telecom could have improved on was communication. ‘You need to communicate more and more and always and it’s never, ever enough,’ he says. France Telecom had several mediums of communication including, “websites by region, by business where people could interact and managers who were conveying the messages,” he explains. Wenes recognises that they didn’t react fast enough and that was the main mistake.
Wenes describes 2009 as a ‘very unpleasant’ year. In difficult times, in Wenes experience, there is no difference between difficult times and non-difficult times, “I’m not even sure the leader has any easy times,” he says.
“One thing I would like to be is less demanding, but that is just in my nature because of the job.” Wenes admits he needs to work on overcoming his demanding image so that people feel more comfortable to tell him their concerns.
It is apparent that businesses who work heavily towards targets and goals need to consider how they manage their employees. Occupational stress caused by huge demands can have devastating consequences, therefore managers need to set more support services in place and improve internal communication in order to create a healthy work environment and as a result, a healthy workforce.
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