Some people are lucky; they sail through life with a ‘devil may care’ attitude and don’t seem to be susceptible to the ill-effects of the modern workplace. For the rest of us, though, we’ve got to watch out as there is a very real and ever-present danger in every workplace, be it small or large.

That danger is stress.

Sometimes stress isn’t taken seriously enough, yet it is one of the most commonly cited reasons for employee absence. Unlike most ailments, however, stress can take more than a few days tucked up in bed to cure. For many people stress is debilitating, impacting in all areas of their lives. Relationships suffer, tensions rise, friendships wane. It’s a bad thing.

In the call centre, it’s quite common for agents and management alike to be placed under ever-increasing pressure to meet often arbitrary performance targets. Quite often these targets are based on bad management information and as a consequence unattainable. However, senior management isn’t always the most rational of beasts, and so no quarter is given to those who speak out. As a result, we are bound by unrealistic targets and this places enormous - often insurmountable - pressure onto us.

This causes stress!

Some ideas to mull over

The question is: are call centres particularly conducive to employee stress? I’d like to suggest that they are, and that we can do something about it.

Modern contact centres are all about efficiency and lowered costs. Sure, many will argue otherwise, but when push comes to shove, it’s about getting the most out of a workforce for the lowest overall cost. It should therefore come as no surprise that the workforce get stressed when every last detail is analysed using spurious and unreliable analyses. The average senior manager cares not for statistics. They care not that the mathematical basis for their pie-charts is based on incomplete or incorrectly interpreted data. They just want to ensure that the little graph of costs keeps heading down whilst its sister graph of profits heads up.

The pressure to perform is all around us.

We can, however, do something about all of this. We need to ensure that senior management is educated to the knock-on effects of nebulous and unrealistic target setting. Tell the Pointy Haired Bosses that their targets need to be realistic - and ensure that we exercise our right to full disclosure on the measures that such bosses use to define performance, targets and so on. Emphasise the point that the continual tightening of the target thumb-screws is resulting in worker stress and hammer home the point that stress is extremely dangerous to an organisations resourcing; people quit, or end up on long-term sick-leave. Educate your colleagues - ensure that they understand that stress is not a good thing, it’s not macho and that long hours do not necessarily let you achieve more. Host a chill-out day - something fun which allows workers to leave the daft targets behind and relax. For that matter, why not offer free relaxation sessions or even massage?

There are so many ideas to combat the effects of stress, but these are reactive and the best way to deal with stress is to prevent it ever happening. As managers and strategists, we must be very careful about what we ask of our workforces, and we must ensure that our targets are not built on false assumptions and lies.