Thirty per cent of Irish people claim work has adversely affected their health.
The claim was made yesterday at a conference on preventing and managing workplace stress in a changing Irish economy.
Prof Michiel Kompier of the Centre for Work and Organisational Psychology at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands cited European research that showed 48 per cent of those surveyed blamed tight deadlines and 65 per cent pressure from clients dictating an increased pace of work as the principal cause for their stress.
Prof Kompier outlined the factors known to increase work stress:
work content changing from manual to mental;
the expansion of information and communications technology;
mergers and workplace reorganisation;
the 24-hour economy and the loosening of boundaries between work and home;
the rapid expansion of the service sector;
and overtime, which many people work routinely, despite the decline in official work hours.
Efforts to prevent stress in the workplace may not be working because they were mainly reactive rather than preventive, Prof Kompier said. He also criticised the tendency to use "off the shelf solutions" rather than those tailored to meet the specific needs of individual workplaces.
Professor Kompier called for a dual approach to the problem of stress, combining interventions at both the personal and workplace levels.
Specific interventions that have been shown to be effective included changes to work design and management style and alterations to work schedules, he said. At a personal level, the active promotion of a healthy lifestyle as well as the retraining of managers and employees showed beneficial results. Mr Justice Bryan McMahon, speaking in a personal capacity, outlined the changing legal approach to stress.
Where once courts only recognised clearly demonstrable physical illness due to work, there was now an acceptance of the psychological damage caused by stress.
IBEC's Mr Tony Briscoe said it was imperative employers "deploy pro-active anticipatory strategies for dealing with work-related stress".
Mr Fergus Whelan, ICTU's industrial officer, said stress in the workplace was not just a managerial disease. He said bullying, harassment and an aggressive management style were among the factors that had a greater impact on those further down the organisational hierarchy.
"As work grows ever more demanding, workplace stress will make more and more people ill unless we decide that it is as unacceptable and preventable as other occupational illness," he said.
