Across organisations, some roles have significantly higher stress element than others. In sales roles, you often need to achieve targets or take a knock on compensation. You find another role or move on if you cannot align with the targets beyond a few quarters. Most consulting jobs have very tight timelines,  working with highly demanding customers, and the expectation to be constantly updated. In some academic institutions, faculty have to publish or perish.

Roles are spread across a spectrum on the stressfulness scale. Hence, the first issue employees must understand when looking for a role is that of choice. An informed one enhances the capacity to sail through any challenges in the future. 

The second issue to consider is leadership style. Leadership styles differ across and within organisations. Some leaders empathise and moderate the comfort level of their employees accordingly. They churn the team if the slack doesn't align with the customer's expectations. Others keep pushing people to deliver or depart (constraining their movement elsewhere within the organisation)  from the organisation. 

The third issue is fitment or capability mismatch, which drives high stress levels. The resulting enormous workload can reflect the failure of capacity and demand planning. Managers may adopt an ostrich leadership style by burying their heads in the sand, and the situation may aggravate to the point of no return. 

Stress management strategies include identifying minor stressors (like the daily grind of commute and routine work) and significant stressors (financial, relationship, career, etc.). Not knowing the right strategies to identify and tackle stress also can be an issue.

Finally, the type of the organisation may have a part to play. The push for perfection, high growth targets, stretch work, and chasing the moon situations vary across public limited companies,  partnership firms,  government organisations, and family businesses. 

In managing stress and work-life balance issues,  legislation and policy guidelines must be reinforced with actions involving ground-level managers, organisational leaders, and the industry. 

Resolutions in perspective

Longer-term initiatives

Today, there are far more career opportunities than before. So, informed career choice-making must be encouraged widely. In my interactions with academia, I have been strongly voicing this for fresh entrants to job markets.

Employers should make the nature of work and expectations clear when hiring so that students can make an informed choice. 

My son had to make such a choice when he was offered admission to both engineering and medicine. Guidance sessions with an experienced doctor and with a couple of IT industry professionals helped him understand both careers, the typical workday, and the expectations involved in each field. He finally chose engineering and is happy with his choice.

Even experienced job seekers must understand the nature of work and expectations in the opportunities they seek. Sufficient forums are available on the web to help people understand things better.

Organisations can address the issue of leadership style by creating awareness. Across hierarchical levels, employees need stratified inputs about empathy, identifying stress among their team members, and knowing when to pull back or draw the line to put the tools down. Experiential sharing by managers and leaders about how they handled stressful, extra-sensitive issues (with necessary masked information) should be encouraged. The culture-building team within the HR function must play a facilitative role to ensure that things stay within compliance guidelines on privacy and sensitivity. 

Senior leadership should track the pulse on the ground to understand how employees' well-being and personal needs are being addressed. Business, HR, and functional leaders must do frequent check-ins through open door policy and floor walks. One best practice could be floor walks by leaders from other units, making employees in the target unit feel more comfortable reaching out to the leaders outside their span.

Training and leadership capability-building functions can focus on bridging gaps in individual capability to handle these interactions with employees with the desired sensitivity.

While the above suggestions will help mitigate and address possible bursts of high-pressure situations, some other practical aspects are discussed below.  

Immediate actionables

In tight deadline situations, giving positive strokes right at the time of contribution significantly adds to positive, feel-good situations and reduces stress. Remember Ken Blanchard's one-minute praise, which should be very handy in such situations. Further, a few words of gratitude for stretching and burning the midnight oil are highly motivating (and zero cost) and more so if done in the presence of other colleagues. 

Wellness and health programs should be implemented to minimise unexpected health scares. Organisation policymakers must ensure a well-funded preventive health screening at all levels so those with identified health risks can be advised and guided suitably on their career choices. They can be helped to step back on their career accelerators, and their needs can be accommodated in the best possible manner. This requires a mature HR policy-making and implementation framework where identifying problems and issues does not negatively impact the employees' careers. 

Deploying programs that help employees identify and overcome stress issues will be beneficial. A considerable risk for individuals is adopting negative means like alcohol, tobacco, or even getting into a shell to address their stress issues, and that can take an enormous toll on their well-being.

Kindling purposeful passion alongside work is yet another strategy. In today's world, an urgent task to be assigned is just a phone call away. One can have some kind of purposeful passion that keeps us engaged alongside our work. This passion will have its purpose; one can fall back on it to keep oneself together and draw inspiration. Purposeful passion can include things such as acquiring a new skill in a sport, learning to play a musical instrument, learning a new dance form,  playing with kids, spending quality time with family members in deliberate and planned ways, learning meditation,  environment protection and working for other social causes. 

These passions can be kindled by creating common interest groups that are not necessarily related to work. Employees should be guided to actively participate in these opportunities. Some progressive companies even encourage family members of employees to participate in these pursuits. This can go a long way in reinforcing such programs.

Organisations can also have a defined length of work day, flexibility in time and workplace, and alternate job arrangements for specific life events, health-related needs, and family circumstances. The organisation's policy must ensure fair usage and no victimisation of employees seeking flexibility to tide over work-life imbalances.

Finally, it's also important for an individual to know where the line should be drawn on the ability to tolerate unhealthy or extreme work environments. Strictly confidential voicing mechanisms should be in place to raise and handle grievances swiftly. Any such grievance related to work life and stress should be diligently investigated and resolved by a group that should include people outside the span of the employee concerned.

In conclusion

Our organisations need to be competitive and stay healthy. Stretch assignments and high-intensity periods due to seasonal variations will be part of business cycles.  Professionals in the medical field, travel, hospitality, consulting, tourism, and many other sectors need to work odd times, long hours, and with tight deadlines. 

Also, the competitiveness of nations comes not just from their superior technological and economic environments but from generations working towards building the future, which may call for nurturing a culture of discipline, hard work, and stretch wherever possible. Without this, how can we have excellence? Don't the Olympians and Asian game winners undergo extreme stress during preparation and the event itself and finally emerge victorious? They may fail and get overwhelmed but won't complain as it was a matter of choice they made. 

We cannot wish away the work-life balance problem and stress. At the same time, I am not advocating bad practices, unhealthy work environments, or insensitive handling of issues. I suggest that these issues be addressed in simple and impactful ways through collaborative work among stakeholders like leaders, managers, employees on the ground, their families, and representatives from academia. Everyone has a part to play in this scheme of things. It cannot be wished away by legislation or stringent policy guidance alone. After all, the end objective is to create a thriving and profitable organisation with healthy and successful people.