The workplace is suffering from an overload of emotional problems, training and counselling, and it's time to get back to work. Joe Armstrong reports on a conference with a difference
Our worries about physical and mental health threats in the workplace are over the top. Work is now perceived as an arena for risk and fear rather than productivity and innovation. Human resources professionals should focus on new technology instead of the current 'touch- feely' HR agenda.
So claimed James Woudhuysen, professor of forecasting and innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester, keynote speaker at a conference last week, opened by the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, to mark the 25th anniversary of Industrial Relations News.
We're swamped with health scares, most recently Sudan Red 1, Avian flu, BSE/CJD, moles, obesity, passive smoking, mobile phones and masts, GM foods, deep vein thrombosis, the Pill, falling sperm counts, Disco TB and, yes, phthalates from rubber ducks.
While threats can be real, they are often exaggerated into health panics. In fact, Woudhuysen maintains "we've never been healthier in western society".
And exaggerated health scares aren't confined to the physical. Prof Woudhuysen cites Edward Hallowell who claimed in Harvard Business Review in January that attention deficit disorder afflicted one in every 20 Americans and that attention deficit trait was now of 'epidemic' proportions: "Addicted to speed, we demand it even when we can't possibly go faster As the human brain struggles to keep up, it falters and then falls into the world of attention deficit trait Employees underachieve, create clutter, cut corners, make careless mistakes, and squander their brainpower. As demands continue to increase, a toxic, high-pressure environment leads to high rates of employee illness and turnover."
Prof Woudhuysen asks: "Do we believe the hallowed doctrine of Hallowell - or is he just another quack, peddling his own myths?" If, as Hallowell believes, psychosis is intrinsic to the modern workplace, then that creates a distraction to what's meant to be going on at work - productivity and innovation. Instead, it provides jobs for the boys, namely third-party experts in the management of mental health at work, Woudhuysen says.
Warning us against the "medicalisation of work", Woudhuysen sees the victim culture as denying workers of their own "agency" in the workplace.
Stress in the workplace now is nothing compared to the plight of, say, miners in years past. Machinery in the workplace on the whole is vastly improved. And yet there is this perception of people as "damaged goods", he says.
"A focus on the workplace as an arena for 'wellness' means also a focus on it as an arena for risk and fear. If myths about the damage done to staff beat certainties, that won't help productivity, innovation or employees," he says.
He applauds the National Centre for Partnership and Performance's recent call for a national innovation system and new technology, "even if it may, in practice, prefer to concentrate on the more touchy feely domains of training and development, organisational restructuring, and work design."
Woudhuysen believes it's a "myth that self-esteem is really important in the workplace". The way to build self-esteem, he says, is by achievements, not counselling. Moreover, an increasing preoccupation with values and ethics amounts to "little more than daydreaming" and absorbs too much time at work.
Instead, Ireland should be "getting a rationalist grip on what not to do at work". What not to do also includes "play": "It's successful projects that build teams, not play." Obsessive measuring needs to be curtailed too, other than things like project implementation and graduate retention.
"So don't treat workers as infants who need stroking and telling that they're special. Treat them as grown-ups who get bored only when there is no sense of leadership about. The self needs to be able to stand up for itself, not be condescended to and mollycoddled," he says.
Instead, our focus at work should be on productivity and innovation. Being agile enough to anticipate opportunities. Work with the IT department and develop e-learning programmes, he advocates, citing the example of Glenmorangie, a remote Scots distiller. It set up a centre for e-learning and over a two-year period 250 of 340 employees did compulsory, one-hour-a-week courses in work time on areas like customer care. Accidents at work dropped by 38 per cent and productivity rose.
The global agile enterprise beckons with telework, voice over internet protocols and videoconferencing. Only the innovators will survive.
Joe Armstrong is an author and journalist specialising in workplace health issues.