•You will hear a part of a radio programme about stress and work. •As you

Man: I want to start by saying that stress doesn’t always deserve its negative image. There is such a thing as good stress. Try telling a racing driver or a stage actor "high performers" that stress is all bad and they’ll look at you blankly, because they know they wouldn’t be able to meet challenges without it. Stress is what makes them successful, but this is also true to some extent for all of us. The technical term for stress in general is "arousal". You need to be sufficiently aroused to get up in the morning and go to work. As the hours go by, you become more alert until you reach your optimum performance, which is when you can do your best in your work.
   But bad stress exists too in the workplace. A very common cause is dealing with impossible standards which have been set within an unrealistic timescale. If resources are inadequate, bad stress will be produced. These days stress can often also be due to our circumstances. Competition and the drive for innovation means that many of us feel we cannot handle the sheer number of changes confronting us in our working lives, creating feelings of apprehension and demotivation. And there are other reasons for stress too. Today’s job market can mean that individuals are given excessive responsibility. Knowing that the buck stops with you can lead to difficulties in making decisions, or just in concentrating on the task in hand. A final cause of stress is one where staff are not in a position to blame senior management. While you may be complaining bitterly of being overworked, you may not be taking a good hard look at your own shortcomings. A feeling of being overworked could be due to not setting and using appropriate priorities. If you’re not organising your workload sensibly and tackling things in a logical order. you’ve perhaps only yourself to blame.
  We conducted a survey of 500 companies recently and the results might be interesting. Generally speaking, dissatisfaction concerning stress levels is on the increase. Long hours continue to be a major subject of resentment, and we also heard a substantially larger number of staff expressing their unhappiness about travel—more people seem to have to go to more places more often than when we last conducted a survey. On the other hand, the question of not receiving recognition seems to have reduced in urgency, perhaps due to improved communications systems within organisations. We were interested to see that the issue of staff morale fared quite well in companies with less than 50 employees, where a relatively happy picture was painted. However, an interesting problem facing major employers is the question of recruitment, with applicants appearing to shy away from them in favour of friendlier more intimate environments, even if pay levels are lower there.
   Finally, here are a few words of advice relevant to this time of year, as many people get ready for their holidays. Ironically, preparing for a holiday can be stressful, with fears of everything going wrong in your absence. So prepare the ground by making sure your colleagues are up-to-date about your current projects—send them all an email before you set off. Back this up by having a quiet word with your boss to inform him or her of possible problems, so that he or she will know what to do should anything go wrong. That way, you should be better able to relax away from it all.