Ask Nadim: Toughing it out is out

Ask Nadim

CAREERS

Toughing it out, is out

Nadim Choudhury advises on how to cope with stress if you are experiencing major changes at work and in your personal life at the same time

Dear Nadim,

As 2020 drew to an end, I started reflecting on my personal development and tried to come up with a plan that would keep me motivated and engaged at work this year. Like thousands of others, I’ve found that the pandemic has had a huge impact on our firm and culture. It has also hit me hard personally. Not only have I gone through a messy divorce, but I’ve also had to lead a restructure in my business that has resulted in hundreds of redundancies.

I know that I’m fortunate in many ways. Not least, I still have a well-paid job. But our workforce and capacity has been reduced, which means many more hours in front of the screen in what seems like an ever-more uphill effort. To an extent, that distracts me from the fact that I’ve moved out of the family home and my children (aged seven and 13) are confused and angry with me. Christmas was not easy.

I like to think of myself as a deeply resilient person and that I have enough self-awareness to understand my own emotions and those of others, but the past few difficult months have made me wonder whether I’ve really been tested before. I’ve never had to deal with both major professional and personal challenges at the same time, and in an environment where many of my colleagues and friends are also running on empty.

I wanted to reach out to you to ask if you have any words of wisdom or guidance. How can I keep myself and my employees motivated and focused in another difficult year?

Thanks.

Steven (name changed), 55, Partner, Banking and law

Dear Steven,

Thank you for your email. As you already recognise, your situation, while deeply personal and surely traumatic, isn’t uncommon during this crisis. Over the past months, I’ve spoken to dozens of leaders who’ve found themselves confronted with similar difficulties.

When leaders supervise change in organisations, particularly in tough times, they are often so focused on looking after the emotional well-being of their employees that they fail to look after their own. The Holmes and Rahe stress test, developed by a psychiatrist and a scientist in 1967 to measure the effect of stressful life events on health, is considered a good way of tracking when stress is getting out of hand. The death of a spouse warrants 100 ‘life change units’. At the other end of the scale of the 43 ‘events’ measured, a change in eating habits rates 15. The next most stressful event after the death of a spouse is divorce at 75 life change units. Anyone hitting a total of 300 units is considered to have a high risk of falling ill within 12 months.

Small changes at work can add up and result in large amounts of stress for people. It can feel like a permanent revolution is going on

As that shows, our personal lives are not separate from our working lives and the organisation of our workplaces should not expect us to be robots. Financial services has a high level of burnout and it is notorious for change management initiatives. Lots of changeis to be expected given the dynamics of the market and of the wider economy, but support for employees is often only given when there are large structural upheavals in organisations. Small changes, though, can mount up and result in large amounts of stress. It can feel like permanent revolution.

To avoid that, firms need to provide more support initiatives and processes to check in with employees, even when workplaces are not undergoing radical change. That might sound like wrapping people in cotton wool. After all, adults are expected to be able to cope with things that do not always suit them. But even if change does not cause stress and illness in every case, there is growing evidence to suggest that ongoing small shifts in work practices can have a deep impact on mental energy – and that’s bad for a firm’s performance.

Having mental energy allows us to focus on a cognitive task for a long time. We all know from experience that we concentrate best when we are not distracted. But it’s easy to lose sight of how depleted mental energy can be by “the cumulative impact of many small changes”, as a recent study from Gartner, a research company, puts it. And that is before big life changes such as pandemics or divorces take their toll. The Gartner study was done in January 2020, before lockdown started. It suggested that organisations that supported employees through smaller changes achieved almost twice the gains in mental energy. With that mind, I suggest the following interventions you can make for your own personal well-being and that of your employees:

1. Before making any further changes to work practices or processes, engage with your remaining employees and ask for their input early on. This allows for complete transparency and helps gauge any resistance to change. It will also help you see whether the changes planned are strictly necessary. If they are, staff who have been consulted are much more likely to comply fully and be able to cope better.

2. Check in on your staff, often and in a deliberate manner. Make sure there are open channels for staff to engage with yourself and your senior team. This will not work if other leaders in your business don’t follow your example.

3. When smaller changes have taken place successfully, acknowledge employees who have adapted well. A little praise goes a long way.

Check in on your staff often and make sure there are open channels for them to engage with yourself and your senior team about the changes

4. Take time out when things get too much. It’s easy to underestimate the physical and psychological burden of stress. If nothing else, work can seem like a welcome distraction from personal turmoil that seems harder to manage. But you will not be at your best if you carry on performing at maximum levels when you’re stressed and you also risk damaging your health.

5. Practise negative visualisation. Put crudely, this involves asking “what is the worst that can happen?” and focusing on the good things that you have. It can lessen the impact of bad scenarios if they do actually come to pass and help you to value the present. It also makes it easier to be more resilient and keep going. While the above strategies are not exhaustive, they should help you and your staff cope with any future changes that take place in your organisation.

Best wishes, Nadim.

Nadim Choudhury

Nadim Choudhury is head of careers and employability at The London Institute of Banking & Finance. He is a career coach with more than 14 years’ experience of working with leading business schools. Members of the Institute are welcome to contact Nadim for free one-to-one coaching by email at nchoudhury@libf.ac.uk