Absenteeism due to stress is no good for anyone — it’s time we fixed it

WE’RE the most observed, studied and measured society ever. Ireland can’t get through a week without a new study or survey, measuring something about us.

Our waistlines. The number of homes we’re building or not building. How much less tax money went into Brian Cowen’s exchequer this year than last year. How many hours are worked by the average hospital consultant. (Not that any hospital consultant is ever “average”.) The one under-researched factor is the “acting” issue. It would be great if IBEC, one of the big accountancy firms, the ESRI or the psychology department in a university had a look at this one. Because it’s having an enormous hidden impact on the economy.

It’s in evidence everywhere. In the private sector. In the public sector. In the charities. In the profit-makers.

Look up the management structure of any of these bodies, on their websites, and you’ll find that the chief executive, financial controller, head of human resources or the director of marketing has a little bracketed modifier beside their title. They’re the (acting) chief executive, the (acting) financial controller or the (acting) whatever.

To be an (acting) anything has its upsides and its downsides. The upsides are that the actor usually gets a salary boost, gets to make decisions beyond their normal powers, and can nurture the hope that, in due course, they may become the real thing.

The downsides are that the organisation run by an (acting) executive tends to function, but not fly. Risks get postponed, not embraced. Opportunities get explored, not grasped. Progress is — at best — incremental, because the person in the conditional role concentrates on proving themselves a safe pair of hands, rather than a driving innovator.

The person in the (acting) role also faces the discomfiting prospect of competing for their own job, if it is decided that the “real” owner of that job is not going to return to it. Few experiences are more humiliating than spending a couple of years replacing someone at the top of a company, a state-sponsored body or a division within either, only to be returned to one’s previous post when the public competition for the job produces a candidate the board prefers to the incumbent.

The reason for the syndrome varies. Sometimes, the chief executive or financial controller will leave their post temporarily in order to manage a separate project, whether that’s the setting-up of a new arm of the business or the winding- down of a dysfunctional element of that operation, at home or overseas.

More frequently, however, the leaving of the post is due to stress. Stress is an interesting 21st century phenomenon. Up to now, stress was seen as a necessary component of career-building. If you just wanted a permanent and pensionable job, you didn’t expect much in the way of stress, although the reality is that the most frustrating jobs in the world are the repetitive, boring tasks over which the individual has damn all control.

But stress, in its modern form, is a disabling illness, validated by an endless series of sick certs. In company after company, government department after government department, public sector body after public sector body, those sick certs pile up in the HR filing system while the organisation pays two people — the one on sick leave and the replacement — to do the one job. It has to be costing the economy an horrendous amount of money.

Absenteeism due to stress is noted, but rarely interrogated. To ask about an executive who’s been missing for six months due to illness is to evoke radically different responses.

“He had a really bad car crash,” staff will tell you. “He was doing grand, until one of the broken bones got infected. But they seem to have it under control and — you know Brian — he’ll be back in here within weeks.”

Or they will talk about the surgery a woman had for breast cancer and how the tests are extremely positive, the prognosis good, the expectation of her return high and looked forward to.

IN sharp contrast is the other option, when they go silent and slide glances at one another, waiting for someone else to explain that the person is out on three months’ or six months’ leave because of stress. The change in demeanour and the unwillingness to name the cause of the absence derive, not from any negative view of stress, nor from any sense that, because stress is related to a dent in someone’s mental health, to talk about it might be judgmental.

Nine times out of 10, the embarrassment derives from an unspeakable simple reality in the workplace: that the stress that has someone away from work is the medically validated cover for an organisational failure. It’s a way of treating the consequent symptoms, rather than the infective cause.

A bit like jaundice. If a patient turns yellow, they don’t get a sick cert for the colour they’ve turned. They get a sick cert — and appropriate treatment — for the underlying illness that causes the hue.

Sometimes, the underlying organisational illness that generates a stress absentee is poor recruitment. Someone gets appointed to, or promoted to, a post for which they lack competence. The sad reality of modern business is that it provides the employer with a test period during which they can give a new employee the bullet if they don’t measure up, but it doesn’t provide an existing employee with a retreat route if, having been promoted, the employee realises they should never have taken that last step up the ladder.

So they end up in a permanent state of panic, a chronic condition of fear and failure that leads to them being categorised — often with their active collusion — as sick, when in fact they are simply not able. Providing a dignified retreat route would allow the organisation to gain from the person doing the job they used to do — and are competent to do — while having a second go at selecting someone better suited to the more senior post.

Sometimes, the cause of the stress is that old chestnut, the clash of personalities. Legislation about bullying and harassment set out to constrain bosses from bellowing at and psychologically stalking their staff. However, the legislation was so framed that even one furious outburst can render the boss guilty of bullying — because the staff member perceives themselves to have been bullied. Yet, if the boss decides to minimise contact with the staff member in order to prevent conflict, the staff member may experience that as exclusion.

The end result, too often, is that the staff member calls in sick, due to stress, and someone else serves in the (acting) role until the real owner of the post comes back or sues or comes to an agreement to depart with some cash and no blot on their escutcheon.

Stress absenteeism drains individuals, organisations and the economy. It falsifies relationships, leaves bad management unaddressed and has created a new limbo-role for the (acting) executive.

It’s a silent flaw in our system, long overdue for fixing.