Pressure of work

What works and what does not

The economy is recovering. In some branches requests for offers and contracts galore. They do overtime, they look for staff and they are drowned in work.

They are busy!

If this is a short term problem, there IS no problem, but if the pressure of work continues to increase there is no prospect of better times, it's getting crazier and crazier! It has become time to take measures. If you - as a manager - do not act, the pressure of work will hit. And one of the characteristics of pressure of work is that less work is done, rather than more! People are lost, they are sick and tired of it.

Pressure of work often is a matter of congestion. Work increases, one sees a wave that becomes bigger and bigger. The comparison with a traffic jam is inevitable. Whatever you do, the jam remains. And with that the irritation and the costs and the opportunities missed!

Some years ago we did research for an Insurance group where the pressure of work - and therefore work stress - had grown to unacceptable proportions. The conclusions of the investigation were

What works

1. Attention for the work pressure problems of the individual employee

2. Short term and long term measures. Many measures: ‘fire with pellets’

3. Involvement, cooperation and responsibility at all levels

4.Scheduled approach

5. Good communication.

 What does NOT work

 1. Ad-hoc measures

 2. Everybody for himself

 3. Begin without a proper diagnosis

 4. Simple measures

 5. Only consider experiences

Hiring more people is not what we thought was a good idea at the time, definitely not as a first reaction to the problem. We are still of the same opinion. Manage first, and only THEN come up with measures. That's the order, not the other way around.

Jan Boeren

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  • Work stress can be conquered

  • Good communication helps

  • Attention for work pressure

  • Manage first!

 

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Documents in English

Diez iez Vietnam

This book is about the story of life of prof. Adrie van Gelderen. I met him on one of my PUM missions where he was a local representative of PUM. Adrie told me he had a manuscript of his story of life and asked me my opinion about publishing it. I promised to read it and give my comments. And indeed I did: I told him that his book would not be a profitable cash cow, however, publishing your own literary thoughts will give tremendous satisfaction, it's fun to do and it's not expensive at all.

Now Adrie was seriously ill at that time and unfortunately he passed away before we could take his book into production. So we, being Adrie's friends, decided to publish the book posthumously and donate all the refunds to his 'affiliate-foundation'.

'Diez iez Vietnam!'  is written in English. A copy can be ordered by clicking the link.