WNYLaborToday.com Editor’s Note: The Center for Occupational & Environmental Medicine (COEM), which is located at Buffalo’s Erie County Medical Center (ECMC), is available to Workers both Union and non, providing care to those who are injured, impaired or who develop an illness as a result of workplace factors – which may include exposure issues, physical injuries, or any other job hazard.  The COEM is also a New York State Department of Health-funded Clinic for the diagnosis and treatment of occupational injuries and illnesses for Workers living in the five counties of Western New York. The COEM also offers services for any Worker with other job-related medical needs, such as physicals required for employment or licensure - and they assist with completion of paper work for Worker Compensation Claims. With state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment and a highly-skilled and caring Staff, the COEM’s health care services meet U.S. Occupational Safety & Health Administration, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Health safety standards.  The COEM takes a different approach to the treatment of injured workers through prevention, early diagnosis and treatment.  Opened in 2015, the COEM was developed with great support from Western New York Labor Unions and their Leadership.  The COEM, which is open Monday through Friday - 9 a.m. through 5 p.m., can be reached at 716-898-5858.

The author of this article is Nellie Brown (pictured below), who serves as the Director of the Workplace Health and Safety Program, a Statewide Program of the Worker Institute at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.  Nellie provides Industrial Hygiene Services for the COEM.

Your body responds to stress by using natural survival mechanisms that evolved in humans to deal with life-threatening events - but, what does that mean if you typically experience situations and circumstances that are not life-threatening?

Or when you worry about things that might happen or go wrong, but don’t?

In such cases, your body can over-respond with potentially-serious effects on your health.

How your body responds to a short-term Stressor is commonly called “fight or flight,” when perception of imminent danger triggers the body to release hormones such as adrenaline, enabling you to defend yourself or to escape – probably inappropriate reactions in the workplace when a situation is not life-threatening.

For example, punching out your Co-Worker or your boss is probably not going to help your career.

“Fight or flight” was once considered the only short-term response, but recent research has noted that the vast majority of those study subjects were male and that women and females of numerous other species may respond with nurturing activities and social interaction.

This response appears to be the calming influence of the hormone oxytocin: Estrogen amplifies it and testosterone diminishes it – perhaps explaining the gender difference. 

Your individual reaction to a Stressor is heavily influenced by your personal experiences, in other words - your memories of similar Stressors.

For example, think of a memory or event that happened in your childhood. 

Does it have a strong emotion associated with it? 

Is that emotion positive or negative?

Most likely, you will have remembered that memory because the emotion was negative – you were scared, upset, anxious, etc.

Your brain stores a memory by first attaching an emotional tag to the new information.

You remember most strongly those memories with the strongest emotional tags, but you remember negative events better than positive ones.

This probably improves your survival – you can anticipate future danger or problems and respond to them faster and better.

What if the Stressor goes on for a long period of time because it is typical of your job - whether a workplace condition or a personal interaction – or because it was a traumatic event?

In this case, your alarm system can become overloaded and remain stuck in the “on” position. 

Unfortunately, if you live in a prolonged state of alarm, so-to-speak, the body has an appropriate survival mechanism which involves increasing hormones such as cortisol.

While cortisol typically rises and falls on a 24-hyour cycle, chronic stress causes it to remain elevated continually, and some of the adverse effects could include irritability and hyper-alertness, elevated blood pressure, erratic heart rhythms, and depression of the immune system, especially for fighting viral infections.

Chronic stress has also been shown to decrease the rate of new nerve cell production in the brain’s hippocampus, causing this part of the brain to shrink in size – one potential cause of depression (This does appear to be potentially reversible.)

One option for dealing with stress is to teach the person how to cope with or adapt to the stress – an approach that is certainly helpful and valuable.  

Another option is to change or modify the Stressor itself – in the workplace this may be an organizational structure which creates a lack of control over how you meet the job’s demands and how you use your skills.

So, what could an organization do to reduce stress?

After all, stressful working conditions are not necessary for a workplace to remain productive and profitable.

In fact, they are associated with increased absenteeism, tardiness, and intentions by Workers to quit their jobs – all of which negatively affect the bottom line.

These costs could be powerful reasons to use with your employer to encourage addressing sources of stress.

Healthy, low-stress work and high levels of productivity characterize a workplace with: Recognition of employees for good work performance; Opportunities for career development; An organizational culture that values the individual Worker; and management actions that are consistent with organizational values.

High-performing companies leverage the skills and capabilities of their people by giving them broad latitude in carrying out their job responsibilities.

For organizations looking to harness the full productivity of their workforce, leaving Employees’ potential motivation untapped is a wasted opportunity – another argument Employees could use to promote addressing Occupational Stress.

To address Job Stress, start by identifying the problem: you could use the National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health’s (NIOSH) Quality of Work Life Survey (available at www.cdc.gov/niosh) or hold group discussions with employees to identify issues of job conditions, stress, health, and satisfaction - then design your own survey.

It is also helpful to collect objective data such as absenteeism, illness rates, turnover rates, or performance problem - these are expenses that can justify the time and effort to address Workplace Stressors.

As you review these survey results and data, it should be possible to identify problem locations and stressful job conditions.

Then you can work with your employer to target source(s) of stress.

For example, a hostile work environment may require organization-wide interventions.

An excessive workload may need redesign of a job or staffing needs.

Proposing and prioritizing intervention strategies may involve using a joint Labor-Management Team and/or consultation with outside experts.

Then you can communicate the planned interventions to Employees and begin implementing them.

So, how are the intervention strategies working out?

You could survey Employees again to see if the changes are working.

It is especially valuable to include objective measures – did absenteeism, illness rates, turnover rates or performance problems decrease?

Keep in mind that some solutions may take a while to show results.

Then you can refine and improve the program.

Certainly, some potentially stressful circumstances may have resulted from organizational restructuring and increased reliance on nontraditional employment practices, such as Temporary Workers and contractor-supplied labor.

For some people, many of today’s jobs may hold the potential for improved satisfaction and well-being in the workforce because of their increased flexibility, responsibility and learning opportunities.

While this issue goes beyond the scope of this article, these dramatic changes seem to have outpaced our understanding of how they may impact the quality of work life.