Unnecessary Stress at Work - by Hamid Soltani

Prolonged levels of unnecessary stress at work is not sustainable

 Have you ever wondered why there is such an expanding and ever increasing number of stressed, anxious and dissatisfied people at work today?  From my personal and professional experiences, almost everyone, especially the seasoned and experienced people that I talk to, express their undeniable sense of frustration, agitation and sadly in many cases, they reveal their true sense of hopelessness about their unsustainable situations at work.

Comments such as “I wish I could leave work right now and do just something else, anything, but this” are so common these days and are indicative of our collective sense of helplessness and hopelessness with our daily struggles and experiences at work. These are truly sad indictments of our collective social failures for not understanding and addressing human needs within the context of established systemic structures in our communities. 

As a society, where have we gone so badly wrong to have ended up in such an unintelligent, incoherent and unnecessary dilemma? Instead of such self-inflicted sufferings, why couldn’t we engineer sustainable structures and capabilities for enhancing and strengthening our daily experiences with our multi-layered social organisations and communities? The kind of structures that are designed around human beings and aimed to elevate their sense of belonging, worthiness, creativity and empowerment at work and at home.   

To stop history from repeating we must go to the root causes of these disturbing human conditions: 

• we need to reflect on our human essential needs and drivers that govern us 24/7; 

• understand what intelligent and holistic perspectives and methods we need to embrace in order to create a sustainable designs and appropriate vehicles that could address our collective social needs; 

• we need to reflect and learn from history - why we have not succeeded to-date?; and 

• in order to get “buy in” from our major constituencies, how can we bring about fundamental social and organisational changes without causing major disturbance to our existing “Business as usual”, no matter how dysfunctional they may be at present.