Professional stress

Stress in general is a general (nonspecific) physiological and / or psychological reaction of an organism to a certain situation. Stress is not always a bad thing: it happens to be both "positive" (eustress) and "negative" (distress). But professional stress - a reaction to a difficult (unpleasant) working situation - refers to "bad" stress.

Professional stress, like any otherstress, this is not just a psychological phenomenon. Our reaction to the stressful situation manifests itself physiologically in headaches, back pain, shoulder and neck area, fatigue and even exhaustion. Not only does the nervous system get hit, but the body as a whole.

Why does professional stress arise? The reasons may be different, but conditionally it can be divided into several groups.

1. 
   Physical causes. These include noise, vibration, contaminatedatmosphere and so on. With these causes of stress, workers, for example, are often confronted, but physical factors can not be completely ruled out in any case - even a loud radio can cause stress.


2. 
   
   Physiological causes. For such reasons, an inconvenient schedulework (for example, work shifts), the lack of a normal diet at work. The body reacts to such "bullying" with stress. And if you start eating normally at work quite realistically, then from work with an uncomfortable schedule, you may have to quit.


3. 
   
   Socio-psychological reasons. Among these reasons are tensions withcollective, conflicts, mobbing, underload or overload of employees, high responsibility, lack of time, lack of clear allocation of roles and responsibilities.


4. 
   
   Structural and organizational reasons. These causes cause the so-calledorganizational professional stress. They include too high a pace of work and too tight deadlines for its implementation, monotony of work and the inability to somehow affect the order of the tasks.

Professional stress is dangerous for both the employee and the employer. Long-term professional stress for workerscan "turn around" by professional burnout; in fact, the stress will pass into a chronic form, and getting rid of it will be quite difficult. And the employer, unable to provide employees with comfortable conditions, will face a decline in labor productivity, and, possibly, will lose as a result several employees.

With stress at work you need to fight. In this case, do not think that the professionalstress is a problem solely with the employee. If the working conditions do not change, then the causes of stress, respectively, will not go anywhere. No psychologist can help if you are again and again exposed to stress factors.

Therefore, if the manager is interested in ensuring that his employees perform their duties productively, he must See signs of stress in your subordinates and try to eliminate the causes, if possible. To a greater extent, this applies to socio-psychological and structural-organizational reasons.

What can a chief do to prevent occupational stress? First of all, it is necessary to create a favorableorganizational climate and give the workers the opportunity to organize their work independently (say, to determine the order of performance of work). It is very important to clearly allocate responsibilities between employees - each of them should know what exactly is responsible for. Also, you need to make sure that the employees have the optimal amount of work, there was neither overload of work, nor underload.

If the chief does not care about the problems of his employees, the only way to get rid of professional stress is to change jobs. Sometimes even it is necessary to completely change a kind of activity, if the professional stress is caused not by the peculiarities of the specific work collective, but by the peculiarities of the profession itself, which can not be avoided anywhere.