Stressful Jobs

Last week I moved into a new office, a loft style space with 12 foot ceilings and my company name (Work Life Balance Consulting Group) on the door. The space is large enough that I can teach work life balance and stress management workshops onsite for about 15 people, and quite enough where I can get some great writing done. To my surprise the fire inspector showed up on my second day to take a look at the space, happily I passed inspection with flying colors. What was interesting about the experience was the conversation I had with the fire inspector on the topic of workplace stress.

Even though a new study posted on CNBC ranked firefighters as having the most stressful job, my firemen told a different story. He said most fire fighters are not that stressed in the same way corpraote workers are and that they have great work life balance for the most part, even though they have incredibly stressful jobs. Most of them pick these jobs not for the compensation but because they want to be of service and they want a flexible schedule, sure it’s hard living together with 10+ men sometimes, but the family/brotherhood aspects create a second type of compensation or payoff. My fireman friend went on to say that for highly stressful situations, ones that involve kids, intense hours still resulting in death and badly burned bodies the firemen in his district get same day stress counseling. They get together, talk about their feelings, vent a little, unload, debrief and move on. According to him, most of his peers deal with stress incredibly well because their jobs help put the little things into perspective.

Later that day I began to wonder if mangers in corporate America talked more openly about stress and the stress brought on by change if more employees would feel less stressed because their experiences and events would be out in the opened and acknowledge. What would happened if after a reorganization or layoff a work group did some sort of stress coaching?