All people respond to stress in their environment. At the most basic level, when it is hot, people seek ways to cool down. When it is cold, they seek ways to warm up. Take an airplane full of well-behaved passengers, maroon it on the tarmac, and behaviors will inevitably begin to deteriorate. It may take several hours for the stress to build to a sufficient level that some people will "lose it." How the flight crew acts can slow or expedite the passengers' journey to deteriorated behavior. But leave people in that situation long enough and eventually, everyone will get there. The point is that behavior is inextricably linked to what people experience.
Academic studies reveal that when stress increases past a certain point, workers fall into a downward spiral of decreasing productivity matched by an increasing number of mistakes which clearly impacts safety. "Stress is negative when it exceeds our ability to cope, fatigues body systems and causes behavioral or physical problems," states Mohd. Razali Salleh in The Malaysian Journal of Medical Sciences. "This harmful stress is called distress. Distress produces overreaction, confusion, poor concentration and performance anxiety and usually results in subpar performance."[iii] Let it continue and the inevitable destination is complete burnout.
News outlets highlighted the toll the government shutdown was having on federal workers who were suddenly put in a position of not knowing if they could pay the rent or mortgage, buy gas to drive to work for which they weren't being paid, pay for needed medical supplies or even put food on the table.
Limiting the number of flights in busy air corridors was a natural step to maintain some level of safe operations. But even this had the impact of expanding the population of people experiencing abnormal levels of distress as people were forced to cancel travel plans while others found themselves waiting in long lines or stranded at stopover points in their travels.
Unfortunately, this futile exercise executed by the US government's top executive is being replicated in businesses throughout the world on a daily basis. Top business executives create or tolerate situations in the workplace that levy unnecessary stress on their employees. This can result in degrading productivity and compromising safety. In many cases, business executives are simply not aware of the stress experienced by employees as a result of being distracted by their own stressors.
But how many management dashboards report even an approximate level of stress that employees bring to the job or quantify the amount of stress experienced in various industries as a result of market competition. A safe guess would be none if any. And that's just the baseline with which employees have to contend. Add to that baseline workplace conditions—workplace politics, poor communications and feedback channels, lack of effective authority and accountability frameworks, inadequate leadership, and more—under the control of management that pile unnecessary stress on already stressed out employees and the situation is ripe for something to break. Not only that but increased safety incidents and decreased productivity have an obvious negative impact on productivity.
"The Yerkes-Dodson Law suggests that there is a relationship between performance and arousal," writes Kendra Cherry in Verywell Mind. "Increased arousal can help improve performance, but only up to a certain point. At the point when arousal [stress] becomes excessive, performance diminishes"[vii] as demonstrated in the chart.. Arousal can be equated to the level of activity, and those factors that impact performance also impact safety.
Hopefully, business executives will learn an important lesson about the impacts of stress on their workers as well as their bottom line from the public fiasco of the recent American government shutdown.
[i] JT Crowe, "Trump: Government Shutdown Will End When 'We Have a Wall'" (Money and Markets News, Dec 26, 2018).
[ii] Cuomo Prime Time, (MSNBC, January 24, 2019).
[iii] Mohd. Razali Salleh, "Life Event, Stress and Illness" (The Malaysian Journal of Medical Sciences, October 2008).
[iv] Lori Aratani, Ashley Halsey III, Ben Guarino, "FAA delays flights at New York's LaGuardia Airport, citing staffing shortages amid government shutdown" (The Washington Post, January 25, 2019).
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