Are you suffering from workplace secondary stress?
By 2Y3X non-executive director Steve McNulty
Are you taking your team’s personal problems home with you – a colleague’s illness, a young joiner’s cost of living worries, a suspected addiction problem..?
Pastoral care is an increasingly expected part of the role of people leaders. Yet without the proper training and tools, you may be at risk of secondary stress.??
What is secondary stress?
Secondary (or second-hand) stress is the emotional upset and trauma caused when hearing about the primary first-hand trauma of others.
It is a recognised condition in front-line services, where it is sometimes treated by dedicated teams. In the US, for example, The Green Cross Academy of Traumatology mobilises specialists to disaster areas. Its job is to monitor and support first responders and treat them as soon as they’re showing signs of secondary stress.
Though we’re not for one second suggesting that the average office manager faces anywhere near the scale or severity of issues faced by frontline workers, the theory carries across.
Are you a boss and a therapist?
Workplace secondary stress can affect anyone who works with, supervises, manages, or directs others. It is an unacknowledged problem in the corporate world, which has recently been amplified by an increase in attention on corporate mental health and the Covid pandemic – in May 2020, 78% of workplaces reported an increase in requests for mental health support, according to data by Unmind.
It used to be that managers were expected to manage and employees were expected to look after their own problems. Now, people leaders are responsible for both. However, they are rarely trained to handle and manage other people’s emotional and mental health challenges.
A growing emphasis on workplace well-being should be welcomed. However, in small to medium companies that don’t have the resources of a large HR department, responsibility can fall disproportionally to the small number of people leaders. Ironically, the mental health push becomes a mental health problem.
If undiagnosed, secondary stress can spread across a business, affecting performance and morale. Some 56% of workers say that stress impacts their productivity, while 51% say that it affects their relationships with co-workers, according to data from the Anxiety and Depression Association of America
Signs you may be suffering from secondary workplace stress
As with many mental health problems, the first step to resolution is recognition.
If you’re not convinced about secondary stress, think about what happens to your heart rate and the general mood when a highly anxious colleague joins a meeting. Like a yawn, anxiety is contagious.
Symptoms of secondary stress might include (but are not limited to) the following:?
1.???Constant feelings of guilt that you can’t solve other’s problems
2.???Difficulty in sleeping as you are worried about others
3.???Replaying conversations with troubled colleagues
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4.???Lack of time to think about work problems
5.???Difficulty concentrating or mood swings
6.???Dreading seeing certain colleagues
How to avoid secondary stress in the workplace
Secondary stress can be avoided by providing simple anxiety and stress reduction training for all staff so that an entire workforce’s problems aren’t loaded onto one person.
One extremely useful tool is an anxiety action map to share with staff of all levels. It uses six waypoints to clearly define boundaries, expectations, and solutions.
The cost of ignoring stress in the workplace
As mentioned above, it can be daunting for small companies to invest in stress reduction methods, such as advice from an outside consultancy or an online therapy service. However, there is also a cost to inaction. Mental health problems in the workplace cost ￡1,300 for every employee in the UK, according to the Centre for Mental Health.
Case study – pre-empting secondary stress
My consultancy, Oh Crikey, worked with general managers at a major hospitality provider to help them avoid secondary stress when staff returned to work after the pandemic.
Hospitality workers were particularly hard hit by the crisis, which locked down the entire industry and pushed many businesses into administration. Post-lockdown, many workers had to deal with staff shortages as well as dramatic changes to operations to ensure social distancing. Some, especially those with vulnerable dependents, had concerns about mixing with the general public when a lot about the disease was still unknown.
In advance of post-Covid reopening, we trained general managers in how to help their staff without incurring secondary stress, using the above anxiety action?map. The impact was twofold, not only were anxiety levels reduced for staff, the managers found that clear guidelines enabled them to become more useful and empathetic.
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About the author
Steve McNulty is managing director of Oh Crikey, which helps companies achieve the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profits. During 35 years as a serial CEO, he has founded several apps including stress and anxiety reduction tool ZenPowerApp found at zenpower.co.uk. He is chair emeritus of Vistage, the world’s largest executive coaching organization, where he has helped many CEOs grow, transform and exit their companies.