How staff stress can hit cos’ revenues

Your organisation might be losing between ₹10 crore and ₹100 crore yearly if your employees are stressed. Stress caused either due to professional or personal challenges has an impact on both the Return on Investment – ROI (quantifiable) as well as Value on Investment – VOI (qualitative) of an organisation, according to a study by Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) in collaboration with Chestnut Global Partners.

The total organisational productivity loss per year approximately adds up to ₹49.67 crore, ₹105.48 crore and ₹10.5 crore across IT/ITES, finance/banking, and travel & hospitality sectors respectively, reveals the study.

The India-based study, Workplace Stress: Impact and Outcomes 2016, which assesses the impact of stress on employee productivity, was released during the SHRM’s HR Technology Conference in Mumbai recently.

It says a lack of clarity of goals, lack of flexibility, having to work in shifts and inability to manage personal and professional responsibilities have high impact on absenteeism and result in loss of productivity. Also, respondents who are less than 25 years of age and are at executive/team lead/junior manager level have higher stress levels due to these factors in comparison to those above 25 years. Top professional stress inducers listed in the study include disrespect at the workplace (37 per cent), lack of work-life balance (30 per cent), overtime (30 per cent), inability to process constructive feedback from a manager (29 per cent), lack of support from a manager and when an opinion is not considered (23 per cent).

On the personal front, inadequate income (financial commitments), inability to manage personal and professional relationships (37 per cent), interference of personal relationships in work (15 per cent) and the need to take care of children with health issues or personal responsibilities (30 per cent) have consistently come up as the top stress inducers across the sectors.

The CHROs, according to the report, say managing employee stress is very critical to make sure the talent pool is protected. However, most health & wellness programmes are driven by business interest and not in isolation just to make employees feel good.

The study highlights gamification as the most used (45.7 per cent) technological innovation to promote health & wellness in the IT/ITES (45.4 per cent) and travel & hospitality (51.3 per cent) domain, while for finance/banking sector, it is the social networking or social media (43.4 per cent).

A total of 2,157 respondents from 12 organisations were surveyed for the study, and CHRO/senior management interviews were conducted in these organisations spanning three sectors: IT/ITES, finance/banking and travel & hospitality.

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