Occupational Health

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Occupational Health
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Objectives

• Define stress, stressors, stress response,
  strains, distress
• Identify known stressors
• Describe stress-performance relationship
• Describe basic processes in stress and coping
  models
• Identify physical stressors in the workplace and
  their moderators.
• Understand how alternative work schedules
  influence worker attitudes and behavior.
• Describe stress management techniques
• Describe the kinds of relationships and conflicts
  between work and family and dual-career families
  (in book)

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Sick Employees Cost Businesses 60B a Year
Headaches, Back Pain, Arthritis and Maladies Cost
Employers More Than 60 Billion a Year Most of
those costs are from sub-par job performance as a
result of the pain rather than absenteeism,
according to the study, based on a telephone
survey of 28,902 workers in a wide variety of
blue-collar and white-collar professions. The
Associated Press
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Stressful Definitions

• Stress Prolonged or large discrepancies between
  a persons perceived state and desired state
  provided that the presence of this discrepancy is
  considered important by the employee
• Stressor
• Stress response actions to return controlled
  variable to desired state
• Strain/distress physical or psychological
  outcome of stress

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Stressors

• Job demands-control (Karasek Model)
• Boredom
• Role conflict/role ambiguity
• one persons ambiguity is anothers autonomy
• Police work
• Macro process outcomes associated with
  emphasizing stressfulness of work

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Research

• Anxiety (stress) to performance curvilinear
  relationship (the Yerkes-Dodson Law)
• Link between stressor and response is difficult
• Fight or Flight response

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Yerkes-Dodson Law
Performance
high
low
high
Anxiety (Stress)
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(No Transcript)
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Physical Stressors

• Their effect is dependent on

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Noise

• legal limits regarding duration of exposure
• harder on difficult, cognitive, or perceptual
  tasks
• reason familiarity an issue
• harder on quality than quantity
• Music
• Muzak
• 17 8 in factory production
• 13 8 in clerical performance
• _____ in airline res turnover
• 32 9 in fatigue
• Choice, headphones, etc. - little research

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Temperature and lighting

• Lighting
• Sex differences
• Women prefer work better
• Men prefer work better
• Type of work (e.g., no glare on computer screen)
• Temperature
• Extremes of effective temperature has detrimental
  effects
• The advantage of rest periods

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Work Schedules

• Shift Work (25 of all employees)
• Major finding is _________________________________
  __________
• Physical symptoms
• digestive problems, leg foot cramps, Colds,
  menstrual problems, alcohol use, inadequate sleep
  pattern fatigue
• Less satisfactory home social life,
  psychological health, work
• Less of a problem if
• other companies on shifts
• minimize rotating shifts
• use 25 hour schedule to advantage?

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Flexible Work Week

• Potential advantages
• Ease of managing non-work commitments (but not
  children)
• Increases employee feelings of personal control
• Reduces travel time necessity to be at work on
  time (original reason for it - more popular in
  large cities)
• Reduces tardiness overtime costs sick leave
  costs
• Disadvantages
• Difficulty in scheduling meetings
  clients/customer service
• Core hours
• Flexitour (submit schedules in advance)
• Increases necessity to watch workers

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Effectiveness
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Compressed Work Week (4/40)

• Can save on commuting, startup cleanup, etc.
• The evidence is scarce but

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Other options

• Peak-time pay
• part-time, higher pay
• fast food banking
• Job sharing
• to alleviate family responsibilities
• higher level jobs than part-time
• one job, shared results
• Homework
• Increasing w/ advances in technology
• Ease family responsibilities?
• Unions government opposed
• Many miss the social interaction
• Supervision difficult, must evaluate results

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Work schedule issues

• Child care
• "going rate" v. supported
• 100,000 startup
• 2000/child/yr
• Vouchers referral
• Mixed
• Backlash issue
• Moonlighting (5)
• seems