Jeffrey Pfeffer - Dying for a Paycheck

Y OU DONT HAVE TO work in a coal mine, on an oil rig, in a chemical plant, or in construction to face a possibly toxic, health-destroying workplace. In todays work world, white-collar jobs are often as stressful and unhealthful as manual labor or blue-collar workfrequently more so. Thats because physical dangers at work have been largely eliminated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the United States and comparable agencies in other countries. Reprising a lesson from the quality movement that what gets inspectedand measured and reportedgets affected, countries pay attention to workplace fatalities and incidents, such as falls or chemical spills, where bodily harm can be readily ascertained. The result: the rate of workplace deaths in the United States decreased 65 percent just between 1970 and 2015, while the rate of workplace injuries fell some 72 percent over that same time.

Meanwhile, stress at work, not subject to OSHA reporting or intervention, and seemingly invisible and accepted as an inevitable part of contemporary workplaces, just keeps getting worse for almost all jobs, resulting in an ever-higher physical and psychological toll. For instance, the health website WebMD reported that work was the number one source of stress,

If the aggregate statistics are disturbing, the individual stories are truly horrifying. Talk to the person in a senior finance role working in a rapidly growing medical services provider. Confronting almost impossible work demands that required frequent all-nighters, she began taking stimulants, moved on to the exceedingly available cocaine, and numbed the constant workplace stress and abusive supervision with alcohol. Her (ultimately successful) detox process from workplace-induced alcohol and drug addiction required enormous amounts of psychological and financial resourcesand, of course, leaving her toxic place of employment.

Or interview the television news producer who demonstrated organizational loyalty and commitment by being willing to go anywhere in the world at any time on almost no notice to help get the story. That person gained sixty pounds in a short period from not having the time to eat properly, let alone exercise. The unrelenting job demands jeopardized the persons marriage and the relationship with their child as well as their physical and mental health.

Or converse with the person receiving workers compensation while on disability leave after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder caused by their job at the electric utility Southern California Edison. The PTSD came from excessive work demandstoo much work given, too lean staffing levels, and the unrelenting pressure from supervisors to complete the impossible workload.

The stories are almost endless and the costs, to people, their employers, and the larger society, are enormous. For example, the American Institute of Stress maintains that job stress costs US employers more than $300 billion annually., on the toll of unhealthy workplace practices, the costs to just the US health-care system approach $200 billion a year, and may be more.

Unfortunately, the problems from what IESE Business School professor Nuria Chinchilla once aptly called social pollution seem to be getting worse, not better. Possibly the saddest part of the tale: even as organizations of all kinds regularly permit, if not encourage, management practices that literally sicken and kill their employees, these same employers also suffer because toxic management practices and unhealthy workplaces do not improve organizational profitability or performance. On the contrary, unhealthy workplaces diminish employee engagement, increase turnover, and reduce job performance, even as they drive up health insurance and health-care costs. All too many workplaces have management practices that serve neither the interests of employees nor their employers, truly a lose-lose situation.

Peoples needless harm and suffering occur even as companies tout their environmental bona fides. Ironically, companies have developed elaborate measures to track their progress on environmental sustainability with little thought given to the companies effects on human sustainability. Although environmental sustainability obviously is essential, so is human sustainabilitycreating workplaces where people can thrive and experience physical and mental health, where they can work for years without facing burnout or illness from management practices in the workplace. We should care about people, not just endangered species or photogenic polar bears, as we think about the impact of corporate activity on our environments. And as companies obsess over their carbon footprint, they would do well to consider their effectstheir footprintson the human beings, a carbon-based life-form, who work for them.

As we will see in the pages that follow, if anything is going to change with respect to workplace well-being and employee physical and mental health, some or a combination of the following things will need to occur. First, current and prospective employees must understand what constitutes health risks in their work environments, and that includes the psychosocial risks that are today more omnipresent and dangerous than the risks of physical injury. Armed with that information, people must then begin to select and deselect their employers at least partly based on stress-related dimensions of work that profoundly influence their physical and mental health.

Second, employers will need to understand and measure what their toxic management practices are costing them, both in direct medical costs and more indirectly in lost productivity and increased turnover. That understanding and quantification of the costs of toxic work environments seems like a necessary first step toward change.

Third, governments at all levels will need to first acknowledgeand measureand then do something about the externalities created as employers offload people who were physically and psychologically damaged at work onto various parts of the public health and welfare system. The public costs of privately created workplace stress and unhealthy workplaces have already prompted policy attention and action in the United Kingdom and in many Scandinavian countries, in part because with government-funded health care, it is in the economic interests of public agencies to reduce unnecessary health-care costs, including preventable costs from workplace stress.

And fourth, societies will need social movements, or maybe several social movements, that make human sustainability and peoples work environments as important as environmental sustainability and the physical environment have become. Decades ago, companies regularly dumped pollutants into the air, water, and ground. Then people decided that preserving the physical environment and having businesses pay for the external harm they were causing were worthy social goals. Because of the environmental movement, publicity, and political pressure, governments all over the world passed laws and nations developed norms that curtailed many actions that polluted the physical environment. In a similar fashion, societies would benefit from movements that resolutely take the importance and sanctity of human life and peoples physical and psychological well-being more seriouslynot just at lifes very, very beginning or at its very, very end, but throughout peoples lives, including their lives at work.

ANOTHER INCONVENIENT TRUTH

Several distinct but interrelated events caused me to delve into the topic of work organizations and their effects on human health, while undertaking the research that resulted in this book.