You don’t have to work in a coal mine, on an oil rig, in a chemical plant or in construction to face a possibly toxic health-destroying workplace. In today’s work world white-collar jobs are often as stressful and unhealthy as manual labour or blue-collar work – frequently more so. That’s because physical dangers at work have been largely eliminated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the US and comparable agencies in other countries. Reprising a lesson from the quality movement that what gets inspected – and measured and reported – gets affected, countries pay attention to workplace fatalities and incidents where bodily harm can be readily ascertained. The result: the rate of workplace deaths in the US decreased 65% between 1970 and 2015, while the rate of workplace injuries fell some 72% over that same period.
But stress at work, not subject to OSHA reporting or intervention and seemingly invisible and accepted as an inevitable part of contemporary workplaces, keeps getting worse for almost all jobs, resulting in an ever-higher physical and psychological toll. For instance, health website WebMD reports that work is the number one source of stress. The American Psychological Association’s 2015 report Stress in America notes that the top two sources of stress are money and work, with almost a quarter of all adults citing extreme levels of stress. Another poll of almost 3,000 people found that nearly half of employees had missed time at work because of work-related stress, 61% said that workplace stress has made them physically ill, and 7% said they had been hospitalised because of workplace stress and its physiological effects.
If the aggregate statistics are disturbing, the individual stories are horrifying. Talk to the person in a senior finance role working in a rapidly-growing medical services provider. To confront almost impossible work demands that required frequent all-nighters she began taking stimulants, moved on to the exceedingly-available cocaine, and numbed the constant workplace stress and abusive supervision with alcohol.
Or interview the television news producer who demonstrated organisational loyalty and commitment by being willing to go anywhere in the world, at any time, on almost no notice, to help get the story. That person gained 60 pounds in a short period from not having the time to eat properly let alone exercise.
Or converse with the person receiving workers’ compensation while on disability leave after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder caused by their job at an electric utility company.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. It is completely possible to save tens of thousands of lives and billions on healthcare and other costs annually, all while making organisations more effective and productive.
As places like Barry-Wehmiller, Patagonia, Zillow, Collective Health, Google, and DaVita (among many others) illustrate, it is at once feasible and imperative to create healthy workplaces where human wellbeing thrives. It is possible and indeed necessary to build work environments that promote, rather than diminish, human sustainability. It is, indeed, good for business.
Suppose work wasn’t a four-letter word, and workplaces were not hazardous to people’s physical and mental health. Healthcare costs would be lower, both for employers and for society, and productivity and performance would be higher. It shouldn’t take data to demonstrate the common-sense idea that physically- or psychosocially-distressed people don’t do their best work. If we changed workplace practices and environments to reduce stressful conditions employers would no longer be damaging, even killing, their people. And those people would not have to be ‘dying for a pay cheque’.
Jeffrey Pfeffer is Thomas D Dee II professor of organisational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. This is an exclusive extract from his new book Dying for a Paycheck
