Empowering employees
[caption id="attachment_38524" align="alignright" width="405"] TAKE A BREAK: We need to detach from work in order to feel refreshed[/caption]
WHY are we so stressed just a few weeks after a holiday? While you may feel that a holiday is just what you need when you are run down, the positive psychological effects are actually short-lived.
A German study by Sabine Sonnentag at the University of Konstanz last year showed that just four weeks after a holiday, workers were back at pre-holiday exhaustion and stress levels.
Could today's always-connected business environments be contributing to this problem? According to Sonnentag, employees who were not able to detach from work on a daily basis had higher levels of emotional exhaustion and lower life satisfaction.
"Detaching from work allows individuals to feel recovered and refreshed," Sonnentag said. Without this, staff had less energy and were less efficient in their work lives. While this may sound good in theory, many employees still feel the need to keep up with growing workloads.
Office design firm Paragon Interiors believes that the blur between work and leisure time is being fuelled by ineffective workspaces.
"We follow research from around the world on workplace trends and one message is clear – today's workspaces are no longer allowing us to work effectively," marketing manager for Paragon Interiors Lucy le Roux said.
Research from European consultancy firm Leesman showed that only 53% of European office workers felt that the design of their workplace enabled them to work productively. Similarly, research in the US by Gensler found that 75% of corporate workers did not work in optimal workplaces and struggled to work effectively.
At home in South Africa, the Discovery Healthy Company Index 2012 indicated that the physical work environment – temperature, noise and ventilation – was a source of stress for 43% of the 19000 employees evaluated in the survey.
"Businesses are simultaneously trying to cut overheads by shrinking workspaces and creating high-density open-plan environments, while trying to get the best results out of their people," the study authors said. "This isn't possible and employees are taking a personal toll as their private lives pick up the slack for work they cannot get done at the office due to constant distractions, noise and disruption."
According to Peter Drucker, the management consultant who contributed to much of the philosophical and practical foundations of modern corporates, "the most important contribution of management in the 20th century was the 50-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of the knowledge worker."
Le Roux said that this required not just a change to the way many offices had been designed in the past but also a change to how employees were managed. "Results-only work environments provide workers with a variety of work settings in the office and the option to work wherever they are most effective, including working from home," she said.
"What matters is results, not that you're sitting behind your computer. This empowers employees, particularly knowledge workers who work best in quieter environments, to get more done in less time, so that when we get home we can actually recharge."
