Ditchmen • NUCA of Florida Ditchmen • April 2018 | Page 8

Stress Balls Will Never
Fix Anyone's Stress
via Jeff Petescia,
Viventium.com
Last month was Stress
Awareness Month and your
employees are stressed.
That’s the bad news.
Now for the worse news: 65
percent of Americans cite
work as a top source of their
stress, and more than one-
third say they experience
chronic work stress.
Now for the horrible news:
All that tension and pressure
is causing anxiety, insomnia,
high blood pressure, and
seemingly every other
malady you can (but probably
shouldn’t) obsess about on
WebMD.
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DITCHMEN • APRIL 2018
Unfortunately, just 36
percent of employees say
their organization provides
sufficient resources to help
them manage that stress.
Except, how can that be?
What about the acupuncture
benefits, on-site fitness
centers, complimentary yoga
classes, and other wellness
options that many employers
are offering? Aren’t they
supposed to relieve stress?
Yes, and that’s part of the
problem. They relieve stress.
What’s wrong with that? Their
effects are temporary and fail
to tackle the root causes of
stress.
“Wellness programs are an
attempt to remediate the
harmful effects of what’s
going on in the workplace,”
Jeffrey Pfeffer recently told
The Washington Post.
Pfeffer, a professor at
Stanford and author of a new
book, Dying for a Paycheck,
goes on to explain, “Instead
of causing you to over-
smoke and over-drink and
over-eat and under-exercise
because of what goes
on in the workplace, and
then giving you a wellness
program, [employers] should
change the underlying work
conditions. If I change the
workplace so you didn’t do
that stuff in the first place,
you wouldn’t need a wellness
program.”
That’s not to say that you
should banish all stress