Welcome to Discuss HR, the HR blog written by Human Resources UK.
Happy New Year!
The New Year has brought some notable changes to the blog. I have re-designed the blog with the intent of making it more user friendly for you. I hope I have achieved this and would welcome your feedback. Secondly and more importantly, I am delighted to welcome a host of new writers to the Discuss HR team. We have doubled our size and now number 16 HR professionals with some exceptional bloggers to boot. Finally, we will now publish our posts twice weekly, typically every Monday and Thursday morning. I hope you enjoy these changes and without further ado one of our new writers, who you may well recognise from prior guest posts, Wendy Mason. (Ed Scrivener)
Stress and the HR Professional
As you know stress is the body's way of responding to the demands put on it. It can be caused by both good and bad experiences. When people feel stressed at work (and elsewhere) their bodies react by releasing chemicals into the blood. These chemicals give us more energy and strength to deal with immediate pressures. They can give us the strength to deal with an emergency and then, when the pressure disappears, the chemicals just disappear from the body.
As an HR professional I suspect you can think of lots of times when you have had to react in just this way. For example, when there is sudden and unpleasant news to be delivered. But what happens when we are under constant stress – for example, when we have to deal with a complicated and extended down-sizing exercise? Well, again as you probably know, that same helpful fight or fright response starts to work against us. If we are under constant stress, the chemicals released remain in our bodies causing the more unpleasant symptoms of stress. These have been associated with things like heart disease, high blood pressure and strokes. Certainly, stress can contribute to alcoholism, obesity, drug addiction, cigarette use and depression.
Why if you know about this already, am I rehearsing here? Well, for the very good reason that I think we are much better at warning our clients about the effects of stress, than thinking about and managing our own stress. Why do I think that? Mainly, I’m basing my assumption on my own experience.
I can think of two large tasks in HR which led me to have to deal with my own symptoms of stress.
The first was major down-sizing exercise I led for a government department which should probably be nameless. It was a department that traditionally had employed battalions of copy typists. With the advent of word-processing, their work had disappeared and guess who was charged with giving the good news and managing the resulting organizational change. Unfortunately, at that time, their location and what was happening elsewhere in the department meant there was very little possibility of re-deployment. Many of them I knew personally and I knew how dependent they were on the jobs we provided. It hurt. It hurt them and it hurt me. Oh I could rationalise it till the cows came home. We all knew why it was happening, but it still hurt and it went on hurting.
On the other occasion, I had a complicated and challenging TUPE transfer to manage - 2000 people from 112 different employers all being moved into one new organization. It had to be done quickly and it was full of uncertainty because the organization they were to join didn’t exist yet. I have never worked so hard.
Somehow both tasks were completed with relative success. Many of the copy typists opted with our support to try completely new things and to be prepared to be flexible in looking for new work. The TUPE transfer took place as planned with far less hiccups than some had predicted.
But, among others, I paid a price. Stress can affect how you feel, how you think, how you behave and how your body works. I spent much of that time feeling irritable and anxious. I was not a particularly pleasant colleague and I was certainly not a very pleasant partner at home. I spent quite a lot of time with my thoughts racing, expecting the worst to happen. Plus, on top of that, I found I was suffering from sinusitis which for me is a stress reaction.
I was very lucky; I had an understanding and supportive partner at home and a very good team at work. But had I been more willing to admit to myself that I was showing the signs of stress and then sought help, things might have been a lot more comfortable and, who knows, I might have had an even more successful result. I might have been able to do even more to ameliorate the negative effects of the changes for others.
If I was facing the same challenges now, I would certainly monitor how I was feeling more closely and take action earlier. For example, I would certainly have considered working with a counsellor in parallel with my own work. I have done that since when under unavoidable stress and it can make a huge difference to my own ability to cope.
Only you know how you feel at the moment about the amount of stress you carry. Have the confidence to take an honest look at yourself and to seek the help you would be so willing provide to others. I know in HR work you cannot avoid stress but I wish you every success in handling yours well and perhaps a little better than I have done in the past.
Wendy Mason 7th January 2013
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Discuss HR is the HR blog written by members of Human Resources UK, the 10,000 member strong LinkedIn group dedicated to the HR professionals in the UK. Discuss HR is published twice weekly and looks to take an insightful, informative and sometimes irreverent view on the world of HR – all with the purpose of generating a discussion.
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If you would like to be a guest writer for Discuss HR, you can find more information here. Our next guest writer week is the week commencing 29th April.
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