Alleviating Stress in High-Stress Jobs

Teaching and social work are the most stressful jobs - Management-Issues

"Teaching and social work are the most stressful professions in Britain, academics have concluded.

Researchers from the University of Liverpool collected data on stress levels from 25,352 employees working in 24 different occupations and ranked their averages according to two measures.

Teaching and social work appeared in the top three for both poor psychological well-being and physical ill health caused by stress.

The researchers suggested that "emotional labour" involving face-to-face or telephone contact with clients, and sometimes the suppressing of emotions, was a central factor in what makes a job stressful.

Other professions also found to involve high levels of stress were ambulance service employees, call centre staff, prison officers, clerical and administrative staff and police officers."

Pete's Points

Hardly news to the people in these types of jobs but an interesting piece of information to the groups of functional managers who may well be in line management control of these people.

Some interesting research that I undertook some years ago as part of a Master's thesis concerned ways of reducing the stress for people involved in high stress professions.

There are two questions you can ask people:

"What did you do today?" - this will usually elicit a list of tasks which were undertaken and/or completed during a working day.

"What did you achieve today" usually either elicits the same list or a puzzled look on the face of the respondent.

What my research found was that if you could help people to answer the second question then they generally were able to reduce their stress levels by better than 70%.

It's a technique I commend to people for their consideration.

Happy to be consulted about individual applications, provided people are prepared to consider my fees for the provision of advice.