Effectiveness and cost minimization

Effectiveness and cost minimization

Introduction

Effectiveness and cost minimization are issues of relevance today with regards to intervention plans meant for patients with psychological challenges. Such deliberations work in occupational medical care. A rise in the number of workers facing emotional challenges linked to workplace stress has risen faster than expected in western nations (Jackson, et al, 2007). The emergence of these challenges has been linked to the increase in the amount of work over the last few decades. At the community level, the cost is substantial in terms of reduced productivity, regularly missing work and the depletion of medical care. For instance, the statistics in Britain showed that approximately 40 million workdays are lost due to psychological challenges (Thomas, Morris, 2003). When it is narrowed down to personal level, these cost relates to high levels of anger, panic, depression, sleep irregularities and mental fatigue. These issues are usually known as anguish and are grouped as adjustment disorders, neurasthenia (health condition with symptoms such as fatigue, migraines and irritation related to psychological issues) or exhaustion. In the Netherlands, for every 100 patients recorded annually between 14 and 50 incidences are recorded.

Interventions put in place to minimize cases of occupational stress can be classified depending on the area of interest, method, period and subject matter. Under focus, the interventions include:

1. Those seeking to raise personal mental resources and reactions

In this intervention, training on stress management is emphasized. Stress management refers to the capacity to tackle and reduce the physical and psychological consequences of anxiety. It focuses on mental and behavioural interventions. It forms an integral part of these interventions and ranges from technique to relax one’s body, mental and behavioural methods as well as customer-focused therapy.

1. Those seeking to adjust the occupational setup.

This intervention involves organizational development. Organizational development refers to the process of supporting organizations to improve through adjusting the policies, authority leadership management and work plan. It also uses interventions ranging from mental and behavioural methods, multimodal interventions, a technique to relax one’s body and organisational-centred interventions. The relaxing approach emphasizes on physical and cognitive relaxation as a way of dealing with the effects of stress.  On the other hand, multimodal interventions focus on obtaining both passive and active stress managing skills. Emphasizing on the entire organization is also important when looking at workplace stress interventions.

Negativity can affect workplace tremendously compromising the efficiency of both the employer and workers. If it is not looked into, it could result in poor productivity, high levels of anxiety among workers, negative reviews from clients, poor company culture as well as high turnover rates. For the United States of America, statistics have shown that negativity costs the county’s economy approximately 300 billion dollars per Year (Gordon, 2008). Therefore, it is to the advantage of both the employer and employees to adopt positive ideas toward making the workplace environment better.

All companies design their strategies around techniques to improve profit margins, minimize losses and attain the biggest return on investment. Scholars have observed that most of the times the employers often ignore their employees’ satisfaction, joy and well-being at work (Brunetto, 2013). The challenge is that employers fail to notice that employees are the drivers of their business and therefore they fail to treat them as a valuable asset. The management does not comprehend that higher productivity can be attained by ensuring the work environment is well balanced by making sure employees feel comfortable and happy (Chandrasekar, 2011). The inability to visualize is the major cause of angry and dissatisfied workers which results in a deficiency in services as well as increased turnover rate. This makes the workplace unfavourable for employees. Whenever a dissatisfied employer quits a company the take their skills and expertise with them leaving the organization struggling to find a replacement (Cappelli, 2012). Finding a good match for the position and training the new member is time-consuming and costly. For this reason, companies have suffered severely due to costs implication caused by high turnover rates.

A report by Forbes Magazine pointed out that the cost of turnover can amount to between a month’s and many years’ salary of the quitting worker and is controlled by the nature of the job and the level of management. The Society of Human Research Management carried out a research which discovered that the cost of turnover shown by the 30cases they researched on fell between 5.8% and 213 percent of the quitting workers’ salary, however, was about one-fifth of the salary in recruitment and training spending (Boushey & Glynn, 2012). To calculate the turnover cost, separation costs, recruitment costs, orientation and coaching coasts, as well as the projected loss of productivity, must be considered. It is of importance for the employer to consider including the notable influx of costs related to recruiting for a costly position due to the expenses on coaching and reduced productivity. All this of associated with the learning curve experiences for very technical, multiplex and higher ranks. Two categories of costs are linked to worker turnover:

1. Hard costs which include print media, advertisements and background checks
2. Soft costs include the duration for conducting interviews, cross-checking the references and training.

The costs related to worker turnover and the consequences it can have on the entire firm can sometimes be unreasonably high (Poddar, Madupalli, 2012).

The process of recruiting a new team is expensive and has adverse effects on hours for both the management and the subordinates. Conducting interviews consumes the time managers would have otherwise taken to carry out their daily tasks. This time is spent checking resumes, planning the interview, carrying out interviews and conducting the selection process. Tasks have to be delegated to subordinates which often leaves employees with an excessive workload that often reduces their productivity. Further travel allowances paid for out of town interviewees for transport, accommodations, food are additional expenses that make the employee turnover rate exorbitant. Sometimes the employers are forced to pay relocation fee for the new employee and a way of enticing them to take the deal (Scott, Pope, 2007). The new hire might be required to participate in an offsite training course that is also very costly for the company. Such cost includes air ticket, venue etc. for the case of onsite training, more highly ranked staff member is required to conduct the training at workplaces. All these activities distort the daily operations with workers feeling overwhelmed and stressed about the workload on their desk and how the fetch very little from it. In such scenarios, productivity will be compromised, leaving clients angered by the services offered and in the end, the clients will seek the same services from a competitor with better services (Scott, Pope, 2007) Employees, on the other hand, might resign from work.

Expenses associates with the relationship between an employer and the subordinate are often ignored in most cases as an additional expense. Both physical and mental stress has the potential to create a negative work environment which eventually takes over the health of the employees resulting into stress generated sicknesses such as migraines, lack of appetites depression increased weight, wrinkling of the skin, lack of sleep, reduced motivation, drug abuse and headaches which can have deadly effects on an individual. Persistent stress can result in long-term illnesses like hypertension, heart diseases and cardiac failure. It is noted that under normal circumstances, the signs and symptoms of stress can be notices at an early stage. The case is different for stress associated work because chronic diseases take longer to manifest themselves and can be caused by various factors of which stress is one of them. As a result, stress could be ruled out in most cases. Despite that, there is growing evidence that confirms that stress plays a key role in any type of long-term ailments especially those related to the heart, mental and emotional conditions of a person. A report by the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine indicated that medical care costs are almost 50% more for employees that have recorded elevated levels of stress. Regrettably, there is very little attention given on how much stress contributes to the increase in expenses on medical care.

Recent research done by Goh, Pfeffer, and Zenios (2016) showed that 10 elements of stress could influence the health status of an individual. Form the research 8 elements were directly associates with on the job characteristics that stimulate the changes within a work environment. After coming up with the 10 elements, the researcher carefully analyzed the existing literature on medical health to figure out how these elements impacted on the general health of employees. The result was classified into four potential outcomes: self-reported physical challenges, self- reported cognitive challenges, physician’s diagnosis and death rates. The researchers incorporated the fact that workers often face more than one type of stress factors at any specific period, thus they established an arithmetic model that helped them to carefully examine the effects of recurring factors against the expenses of adverse health consequences. In their research, they came up with the following remarkable findings:

1. Workplace related stress results to about 120,000 deaths annually, where about 49,000 are directly associated with lack of health insurance cover and inaccessibility to better treatment. Lack of jobs contributed to about 34,000 deaths and high pressure at work and no job security amounted to approximately 30,000 deaths annually
2. Although some variations existed when the researchers were calculating the costs related to stress at work, they discovered that workplace anxiety contributed to further costs between $125 billion and $190 billion annually across the country.

High levels of anxiety, the poor performance of workers and high rate of employees quitting their jobs are characteristics of a negative work environment. They include poor supervision, lack of enough tasks for workers, dullness, unfriendly work environment, low wages and dangerous work conditions. These factors can harm the mental health and well-being of the workers because they create stress and unfavourable conditions for work. Most employers regard to stress and anxiety a necessary evil at work, however, increasing the pressure on employees without paying attention to their mental health can have detrimental effects to the productivity of the company in the long run. Employers today are using exploitative means to make employees overwork which is a vice in the society. In the short run, the company could realize the targeted goals, however, a drop in productivity will be observed. This could be accompanied by a drop in motivation, innovation, work connected to stress, a rise in cases of employees missing work frequently and threats to leave work. Encouraging and including positive psychological remedies like ensuring the place of work is friendly and meaningful is essential as it will enable the company to realize an increase in performance, a drop in losses and ensure a good balances workforce (Sandhya, Kumar, 2011).

Personality, Personal Motivation and Dissimilarities in Cognitive abilities

Personality traits affect the behavior of an individual at work. Environmental factors like genetics, cases of stress in the past, and the connection of people at work control the character of individuals. It is crucial that if a company is aware of these factors, it should emphasize nurturing their employees, supervisors and managers. In so doing, the company will be able to handle the different personalities exhibited by their staff to attain better working relationship that is friendly and meaningful. Most organization face the challenge of achieving great performance with less spending. Most have opted for cost-cutting, dismissing some staffs, and restructuring, maximum quality and extensive use of information technology. As such they avoid fulfilling the competitive requirements which are often inappropriate. Some scholars like March (2006) have questioned why the possible advantages of human intelligence are being ignored if intelligence involves supporting the company’s success.

Cognitive abilities relate to an individual’s intelligence. Intelligence is a simple way of expressing the differences in the efficiency of cognitive responsibilities that are statistically related to individual factors. Intelligence elaborated the dissimilarities in mental efficiency. Intelligence has identified distinctness among individuals when looking at various cognitive skills to explain more general dissimilarities in the performance of individuals on a broad intellectual responsibility.  People are different in their special way and thus exhibit different capabilities in their ability to solve problems, sense of humour and many other areas. This difference relates to their memory capacities, concentration and how they are reacting to issues. This explains why employees at work can show variations in how they view and perform assignments at work.

Social cognitive theory focuses on the motivation and character that is caused by the constant dynamic interaction between mental, social and environmental factors. Dynamics like aspirations, ethics and beliefs affect an individual’s motivation and their choices on how to deal with various intellectual tasks. Additionally social guidelines and expectations can influence motivation and character. With social cognitive theory, people can maintain meaningful balance over their behaviours. As suck, this theory is an essential tool for human motivation and character because at work employees behave deliberately to profile their life settings. Social setups will affect how individuals behave, however, they do not determine who they become. Therefore, people are a result of their surroundings. Understanding people’s personalities and what motivates them is crucial when dealing with workplace stress.

Dealing with Workplace Stress

Stress is an issue that affects both the management and the employees. As such, a combined effort between the employer and employees is needed to curb this challenge.

Positive Interventions by the Company

Good management should be smart enough to notice that employees are the backbone of the company. Oswald, Proto & Sgroi (2015) opined that happy workers show motivations and confidence in their work as they put more effort, into their roles which in the end helps them to be more innovative and productive. This results in a good performance. The management plays a significant role in ensuring the satisfaction of their workers. The workers’ health is dependent on how well the employer will treat them. Supporting positive intervention is the best technique the company can use to establish a positive and friendly work environment and in the end, avoid increased turnover rates and high-stress levels.  Such interventions included training and professional development, a job as a purpose, the meaning of a worker assigns to their roles, focusing on happiness and development of all members and the company as a whole. Also, inclusion should be an issue of importance, transparency, honesty in communication and supporting teamwork. The job designs and the factors an employer looks at when creating a job description for a particular role is key in determining the happiness and quality of work. Employers should not put employees especially the newbies in a position where they don’t have a choice but to take the work. The employees deserve to feel appreciated by taking into account their need and creating policies that support both the managers and the subordinates.

Positive interventions by workers

An employer is responsible for the implementations of incentives that will create a friendly work environment. However, achieving positive interventions at the workplace depends on the attitude, mindset, character and perceptions of the employees toward the company, their position and the intervention. Employees support is important as it will ensure they are putting some effort to establish, support and develop a positive and friendly condition at the workplace. Positive psychological interventions implemented by workers themselves to support their health and mental wellbeing and attain the level of happiness the wish for could include emotional intelligence, ability to notice and manage emotions and recognizing the emotions of fellow employees, individual strengths and weaknesses identification, and creating meaning in own job.

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is defined as an environment defined by economic uncertainties, competition throughout, technological changes, rise in political instability and an employment market that is irregular. The current job market can be termed unstable. With workplace stress on the rise, countries like the United States continue to record high numbers of cases of depression, anxiety, obesity and heart-related ailments amongst the citizens of America across the country. Emotional intelligence is one incentive that can be applied at work to deal with stress-related problems.  It can be defined by the capability of an individual to recognize, evaluate and control their emotions and that of people around them (Mayer, Salovey, Caruso, 2008). There is a four dimension ability-centred model that was created and is organized in order from the lowest to the highest:

1. Perception of emotions- this talks about the ability of a person to correctly recognize and perceive self-motion and that of others.
2. Application of emotions to facilitate though this talks about the ability of a person to create and apply emotions in meaningful ways to support one’s thoughts and decisions.

• Comprehending and analyzing emotions- this talks about the ability of a person to label and comprehend complex feelings and how such feelings shift, combine and progress.

1. Reflective control of emotions to enhance emotional and mental growth- this deals with a person’s ability, to be honest about good and bad emotions, watch out for one’s emotions as well as those of others.

Mixed models also exist to help with the process of tackling workplace stress. This model categorizes five major principles of emotional intelligence:

1. Self-awareness which is the ability to identify individual emotions, the causes of these emotions and the limitations.
2. Self-regulation- the ability to control emotions to avoid the resultant adverse effects

• Motivation- an internal drive that emerges from a feeling of satisfaction by an individual following a particular achievement.

1. Empathy- the ability to identify, comprehend and experience what others are going through.
2. Social Skills- the ability to socialize and negotiate with other people to find an effective way to meet the wants of every individual.

In conclusion, analyzing the characters of workers with the social cognitive theory is important in understanding the different personalities and how they affect the performance of employees at work. It is challenging to meet all the complaints filed by workers but a good number of workers are willing to commend the company for the steps it takes to provide a conducive stress-free environment. A mutual dedication by both the workers and the organization must be present to make work more meaningful, establish opportunities for growth and most favourable functioning of employees, management and the entire company.

References

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Cappelli, P. (2012). Why good people can’t get jobs: The skills gap and what companies can do about it. Wharton Digital Press.

Chandrasekar, K. (2011). Workplace environment and its impact on organisational performance in public sector organisations. International journal of enterprise computing and business systems, 1(1), 1-19.

Jackson, D., Firtko, A., & Edenborough, M. (2007). Personal resilience as a strategy for surviving and thriving in the face of workplace adversity: a literature review. Journal of advanced nursing, 60(1), 1-9.

March, J. G. (2006). Rationality, foolishness, and adaptive intelligence. Strategic management journal, 27(3), 201-214.

Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., & Caruso, D. R. (2008). Emotional intelligence: New ability or eclectic traits?. American psychologist, 63(6), 503.

Oswald, A. J., Proto, E., & Sgroi, D. (2015). Happiness and productivity. Journal of Labor Economics, 33(4), 789-822.

Poddar, A., & Madupalli, R. (2012). Problematic customers and turnover intentions of customer service employees. Journal of Services Marketing.

Sandhya, K., & Kumar, D. P. (2011). Employee retention by motivation. Indian Journal of science and technology, 4(12), 1778-1782.

Scott, A. J., & Pope, N. E. (2007). Hollywood, Vancouver, and the world: employment relocation and the emergence of satellite production centres in the motion-picture industry. Environment and Planning A, 39(6), 1364-1381.

Thomas, C. M., & Morris, S. (2003). Cost of depression among adults in England in 2000. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 183(6), 514-519.