How To Manage Stress In Current Work Environment:Trends.Costs. And Suggested Remedles

In recent years, the cost of stress, in terms of absenteeism, subpar performance, tardiness, and workers’compensation claims, has dramatically increased, undermining companies’performances. The goal of this paper is to better understand the role of stress in current work environment, discussing the four main levers responsible for the creation of stress at the individual level:(1) the individual psychological characteristics;(2) a lack of coping resources available to the employee;(3) the impact of work-related stressors on the singular worker;(4) the influence that the organizational context has on a member of the organization. Successively, the paper proposes new ways of management of such an issue:(1) to hire employees using personality assessment tests, recruiting only stress resistant people;(2) to enforce coping resources thanks to the use of specific training programs based on the creation on purpose of internal team crises;(3) to minimize the impact of work-related stressors showing employees how to maximize their level of physical, emotional, and spiritual energy, and by teaching them how to effectively delegate;(4) to promote a context based on collaboration. In such a setting, the use of two relevant case studies, Vodafone and Intesa San Paolo, aims to show that, despite the presence of specific training programs, in Italy there is no evidence of a systematic and pervasive way of managing stress in companies.