Can workplace stress be reduced or prevented by using a combination of KM and time management principles and tools? Peter Bond of Learning Futures Consulting investigates.

In the early days of stress studies, it was thought some stress was a good thing – for example, a little could make us more creative. These days stress is viewed universally as a bad thing and associated with a range of harmful effects on the health of individuals and on the financial health of organisations and economies.

When stress becomes a feature of your working day it can lead to ‘burn out’, but it might also lead to ’numbing out’, when employees withdraw into themselves, seeking protection from an otherwise emotionally painful working environment. Numbing out also makes it difficult for individuals to respond sensitively and empathetically to the requirements of others.

The diagram below is an attempt to represent different kinds of organisation according to freedom to control one’s work situation. Coherence, or tightness of organization structure (which enables and constrains organisational behaviour) is represented on the vertical axes, whilst the horizontal represents opportunity to change it. The vertical axis indicates a decreasing influence of the effects of organisational structure, which is associated with an increasing feeling of uncertainty and ambiguity felt by those attempting to act within it.

The horizontal axis indicates increasing freedom of opportunity for an individual actor to change the structure. In the extreme north east of the diagram an organisation cannot exist because it lacks the structure that enables concerted collective action to take place. Chaos (lack of order) reigns here. 

In the extreme south-west there is the highly bureaucratic organisation with machine-like structural constraints. A tight structure enables a high degree of control and therefore enables operational predictability, but such organisations are inherently conservative. Literally, they tend act to conserve existing structure. It is when current activity is no longer delivering what the customer wants that it needs to change. 

Changing such an organisation is difficult and so mechanisms for change have to be designed in. Large companies such as Toyota, which have built in change and performance improvement mechanisms known in combination as 'lean manufacture', would be placed in the south-east quadrant. 

Some companies are divided into two cultural spaces. Famously, McDonald’s corporate team would fit in the south-east quadrant, whilst the bulk of it operation would fit into the south-west. An orchestra, at least when it is playing a concert, is a very constraining kind of organisation in which there is no room for individuals to change the structure. If they do, and there’s nothing at all to stop them save their own self-control and fear of post concert rebuke and sanctions, they will spoil the whole performance. 

In such a scenario, controlling has its reward not simply in respect of playing the right notes, but in successful concerted, collective, or social, action. But could you live here wight or more hours a day, five days a week? Some people could. They are those who welcome structure, stability, and predictability; they would not be stressed. On the other hand, if you were uncomfortable with organisational constraint and were happiest when the situation was unpredictable, you would thrive in the north east quadrant. Even so, if you wanted to get something done through others, you would have to create structure that enabled a process of change to be put under control. In other words, you would have to create new order from chaos. This is what entrepreneurs do for society as a whole, and what intrapreneurs do for large organisations.

Running like clockwork

In trying to create a ‘well’ organisation, it is crucial to recognise that people have characteristic preferences in the way they gather, create, share and apply their knowledge. Such preferences are indicated by personality type – different personality types respond differently to different kinds of organisational situations, which can be characterised according to the richness and clarity of the information available.

Some personality types can work effectively in information-poor environments without stressing, but the same types find it stressful to operate in information-rich environments.

Stress is likely to be induced when working outside of a ‘comfort zone’. Knowing personality type and the type of working environment, it is possible to customise a knowledge management system (KMS) or learning network to allow users to access the knowledge they require in the form they prefer (as indicated by personality type and learning style). Whether we refer to it as knowledge, information or a learning resource; knowing it will be available on demand reduces the likelihood of stress developing.

Adding time management techniques into the equation can help different personality types to operate more effectively, with less stress, outside of their comfort zones, as long as they are aware of their personality type and the kind of organisational culture they are engaging with.

The organisational or institutional landscape evolves naturally in a clockwise manner, from chaos in the north-east to a transitional form in the south-east, where structure encourages and enables change to be managed under control, and thence to the more conservative structural frameworks of the south-west.

Over time, even these organisations begin to lose structural coherence as ad hoc changes, made in response to business environmental pressures, begin to accumulate. Bringing an organisation back into control requires a deliberate and purposeful shift counter clockwise.

The south-west quadrant is both a good and a bad place to be. Organisations need to be stable, so they can achieve the things they were designed to. At the same time, they must also be open and prepared to change to adapt to market and competitive pressures.

However, perhaps the worst scenario is to be in the north-west quadrant whilst believing you are in the south west. For example, some senior managers will believe they are in control simply because they have put into place clearly defined goals and a corporate vision, a business plan, a mission statement, a statement of intent to protect the environment, job descriptions, an appraisal scheme, a comprehensive range of operating procedures and acceptable working standards, a quality manual, a hazard book, etc. These run the risk of organisational disintegration.

To be in control requires explicit knowledge to be assimilated, embodied and applied by individual actors. By doing this, they add to this knowledge base by learning to improve performance. To gain control of a whole organisation, senior managers have to ensure that each practitioner is capable of mastering the tasks delegated to them.

This is, of course, where knowledge management comes into play as a means of ensuring an effective structure for organisational learning is in place.

This article is an edited abstract taken from Can workplace stress be reduced or prevented by using a combination of knowledge management and time management principles and tools? By Peter Bond. Click here to read the full paper.