The unnoticed microstresses that can lead workers to snap

In April this year, a 25-year-old employee shot five colleagues dead at the bank where he worked in Kentucky. It was an extreme example of workplace aggression, but not an isolated one. Incidents of anger or violence against co-workers are not uncommon.

Some workplace fracas come down to a clash of personalities or ideologies and, while unpleasant, they don’t escalate. Others are more potentially fraught: an outburst may be the outward sign that an employee is at breaking point. Short temper, changes in behaviour, mood swings and an inability to concentrate are all red flags that something could be wrong.

What causes someone to snap is often never fully understood, but what extreme events such as mass workplace shootings highlight is that stress is not just a personal issue, it’s an organisational one too. Because if the situation explodes, it may compromise workplace safety in the broadest sense of that term.

When situations go wrong, it’s rarely down to one thing. More often, several factors combine to trigger the bigger crisis. It’s the same with stress. Small incidents accumulate day after day and eventually something has to give. This may manifest as an irate driver hopping on the horn the minute the light turns green and the person ahead hesitates, a worker being snappy with colleagues or being constantly downright grumpy. But whatever the origins, free-floating stress makes working and living a lot harder than it needs to be.

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Academic Rob Cross and author Karen Dillon describe this daily procession of the bad little things that happen as “the microstress effect” and they reckon it has the power to derail otherwise promising careers and lives. They also say that most people are not aware that these destructive mini stresses are continually building up in the background.

“Because each individual microstress is so small, it doesn’t trigger the normal stress response in our brains to help us deal with it,” they say. “The long-term effect is devastating: microstress invisibly weighs us down, damages our physical and emotional health, and contributes to a decline in our overall wellbeing.”

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Cross is professor of global leadership at Babson College in Massachusetts. Dillon is a former editor of the Harvard Business Review. Their book, The Microstress Effect, was published by Harvard Business Review press earlier this year and identifies no fewer than 14 types of “invisible and relentless” microstressors they believe damage lives.

Five of them drain one’s capacity to manage work and life, five drain emotional reserves and the final four “diminish your self-identity by making you less of the person you want to be”.

Cross stumbled upon the phenomenon of the microstress effect when researching a book about the practices that make high performers stand out from the crowd. He found that while the majority of the 300 executives spoken to appeared to have everything under control, a little digging found otherwise.

“Many of them were powder kegs of stress but most of them didn’t recognise the state they were in,” he says.

“After decades of research, I was familiar with the kind of recognisable stress that high performers often endure to achieve their professional goals. But this was something completely different. It was stress but in a form that neither they – nor we – had the language to articulate.”

As the interviews continued, it became clear that it was never one big thing that caused people to be overwhelmed but the “relentless accumulation of unnoticed small stresses in passing moments . . . [and this] was drastically affecting the wellbeing of these people who otherwise appeared to have it all”.

For most people, work has a direct impact on their stress levels. The world of work has never been so fast-paced or so complex and this has stretched people’s capacity to cope more in one decade than in the previous three.

Workplace consultants Gallup has identified five key factors it says correlate most highly with the accumulated stress likely to lead to employee burnout. Top of the list is unfair treatment (bias, favouritism, abuse by a co-worker, inconsistent compensation policies) followed by an unmanageable workload.

Up third is unclear communication from managers, a particular problem during the pandemic and still one with hybrid working. Fourth is a lack of support from managers and fifth is unreasonable time pressures.

“Burnout is not just an inconvenience,” Gallup says. “Poor wellbeing affects your organisation’s bottom line through lower productivity, higher turnover, higher absenteeism and higher medical costs due to preventable conditions. [This] can cost organisations 15-20 per cent of total payroll in voluntary turnover costs on average.”

Employees experiencing burnout generally take more sick days, are less confident about their performance and are likely to be looking for another job, Gallup says.

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Cross and Dillon’s book is in part an exploration of “the epidemic of microstress” and in part a self-help book with practical suggestions for counteracting microstress based on what has worked for other people.

“Through our research, we have found that you can structure your life in ways that not only help diminish microstress but also improve your overall wellbeing,” says Dillon who actually resigned her top job at the Harvard Business Review in order to reframe her own priorities.

“This approach will involve – in fact require – building and strengthening authentic connections with others. These connections will, in turn, add dimensionality to your life and help you mitigate the effects of microstress. It’s a virtuous cycle.”