Learn how organizational culture can affect your employees' health
We always hear about environmental pollution, companies that pollute the environment or consume the planet's resources without replenishing them, thus engaging in unsustainable activities. But little is said about the impact of companies on people, especially those who work for the organization. Stress, pressure for results, excessive working hours, all of this contributes to generating stress in employees, returning sick people to society.
According to a study by the Official College of Psychologists of Madrid, released by the American psychologist and human resources consultant Kenneth Nowack, employees who work under “emotionally” intelligent bosses demonstrate greater efficiency, produce more, and enjoy better health than employees under the hierarchy of bossy bosses, who can increase their employees' risk of suffering from hypertension or heart attacks.
According to Guilherme Barbassa, director of Stratec, companies hire healthy individuals from society and return them sick, both psychologically, with depressive illnesses, and physically. “From so much pressure to generate results, people become neurotic, with a low quality of life. And when that person is no longer productive, the company returns the person to society much worse off than they found them. And society will have to bear the costs of recovering that sick person. They are generating ‘human pollution’,” he argues. Barbassa further provokes by saying that when looking at a company's balance sheet, these data do not appear because the company does not consider this factor. “But it should appear because it is generating a cost for society and for the company. Stress is just the first symptom,” he warns.
Priscila Nogueira, director of strategic alliances at Stratec, has already changed companies after realizing she was being harmed mentally and physically. “I went through this, I chose to leave due to stress. Many goals and results to be delivered, without adequate team size. There was no negotiation of deadlines. The focus on results did not include evaluation of personal well-being,” she says.
According to Priscila, the situation is clear: some goals cannot be achieved without investment or increased expenses, or within the proposed timeframe. However, when these goals are not met, the company doesn't want to know the reasons for the non-compliance; it simply blames the owners of the unmet goals. These individuals are then either fired from the organization or mistreated.
Priscila further states that many people feel, at best, demanded, but more valued, when in reality it is not a matter of being valued. “Overloading a person with more activities than they can carry out with quality and responsibility is not appreciation; it is simply overload. The challenge should lie in the creativity of the solutions presented, in the diversity of tasks, in the integrative management of people, not in the quantity of things to deliver at the end of the day,” she asserts.
Nowack points out that “employees exposed to prolonged stress cause more losses to companies and are less productive in the organizational culture.” Scientific studies suggest that there is a 67% increase in the risk of coronary heart disease among employees who work 11 hours or more per day compared to those who work seven to eight hours per day.
Barbassa says that Stratec is a company that cares about its organizational culture and adopts practices such as Home Office and flexible working hours, precisely to prevent stress, since employees can reconcile their personal needs with their professional ones, as well as being able to spend more time with their families, eliminating stress factors such as traffic. “Here at the company we try to meet the specific needs of our employees without creating a stressful, competitive or unhealthy environment. We invest in a horizontal structure where people are very open to making suggestions, contributing and feeling part of the company's success,” he says. Barbassa also says that Stratec holds regular get-togethers for employees in pleasant places like Costa do Sauípe, for example. “The interesting thing is that even by adopting these practices, we manage to achieve productivity well above the market average. The segment's productivity is around 150 to 250 thousand reais per person and ours is over 300”, he celebrates.
It is important to emphasize that stress should be evaluated individually, as the perception of stressful situations differs from person to person within the organizational culture.
