Causes behind Stress at Workplace

Stress at the workplace has become a common factor today. It is important for an employee to understand and analyze his or her present work environment to cope with the growing stress factor. An employee will be able to manage stress at workplace only after proper analysis of the work environment.

First, one must understand the fact that stress affects different persons in different ways. The symptoms vary from person to person. In general features that most people come across under stress are depression, anxiety and insomnia. These are the general symptoms that give rise to more complex symptoms.

Some of these complex symptoms consist of lack of focus in work, inability to perform, lack of enthusiasm, frequent mood swings. There are other physical symptoms as well, which comprise of, stomach ache, shortness of breath, heart disease, migraines, headache and body aches. When you consider the social aspects you will find that stress leads a person towards substance abuse, frequent family conflicts and vulnerability.

Stress builds up in the workplace due to various reasons. Identifying them is no big issue.
One of the most common causes for stress at workplace is job insecurity. Frequent ups and downs of the market and company mergers, takeovers, frequent change in company policies leading to reorganization of company structure increases the stress factor in the employee.

The pressure of outperforming others in the competitive market increases the stress factor as well. With the introduction of new technology every now and then the scope for competition widens in the market. An employee has to learn and adapt to this ever changing work environment. This ultimately increases the stress in the person as the fear of becoming obsolete in the market and in turn loosing ones job enhances the chances of stress.

The expectation of the organization sometimes becomes unrealistic for an employee. The pressure of working longer hours in the same salary sometimes demoralizes and increases stress in an employee. Increase in workload and deadlines makes it even worse. This unrealistic expectation not only increases the stress factor in the employees but it also reduces the productivity of a person working under such constraints.

Family issues and other emotional and personal problems create stress in an employee already overburdened with workload. This is also one of the most common reasons for stress. The employee is not able to concentrate properly due to these reasons and thus the mounting work pressure increases the stress factor further.

Physical harassment in the workplace is another cause for stress in employees. Female employees face greater risk of physical and sexual harassment at work and thus are more vulnerable. Stress due to this factor has become quite common.

The office environment itself can become one of the major causes for stress. Conflicts and gossip are quite common in any office environment. Most employees will agree that office politics today leads to huge amount of stress in a person. These unhealthy practices increase the burden on an employee to the additional workload and pressure that that has been already mentioned.