Judi James - The Office Jungle

Socialize

Many firms use social events as useful team-building occasions. Whereas you would probably balk at the idea of attending a boringly presented company seminar outside office hours, you might be keener to join in organized sporting events or outings.

Team sports against rival companies aren’t only a method of letting off steam, they are also a valuable way to get various departments galvanized into co-operative gangs. Seeing colleagues outside the office environment forces you to view them in a fresher, less stereotypical light, too.

ACTION PLAN:

1 Make time to find out more about the company you work for. Information-gather, attend meetings and read company literature.

2 Plan ways to improve communications between colleagues and departments.

3 Raise your profile within your company.

In the fifties you’d have suffered with your nerves and got told to pull yourself together. In the sixties you’d have seen your doctor and been given Valium. In the seventies you were told you were uptight and the cure was to become more laid-back. In the eighties we were diagnosed as suffering from stress and executive burn-out and marinated in aromatherapy oils while we cogitated in our flotation tanks.

Stress is still very much the buzzword of the nineties workplace. Its symptoms are so comfortingly diverse it lends itself to effortless self-diagnosis. You lose your temper? Stress. Forget to do something important? Stress. Have a headache? Stress. Hair-loss, over-eating, spots, gross stupidity, sweating, screaming, weeping or impotence can all nestle beneath the banner of stress-induced symptoms.

If you think it’s your job causing the stress remember that unemployment is generally considered to be far more stressful. So is spending all that horrible money if you win the lottery. In fact, our brains seem capable of producing adequate stress secretions in virtually any situation.

Holidays are great stress inducers – all that packing and planning combined with those delayed flights and hotels built around sewage farms. Alternatively, if you decide to stay at home and do nothing you can get hit by delayed stress. Haven’t you heard of people who only get ill at weekends or during the week’s holiday they took? Maybe they’d been managing their stress too well on a daily basis and it decided to go on a little holiday too.

Triggers

There is no one trigger for stress, just as there is no one cure.

For really ideal stress-inducing conditions, though, look no further than the average office. The office is the perfect place to succumb to stress – and to moan about it, too. There’s the ‘too-much-work’ stress, the ‘boss-or-colleague-from-hell’ stress, the ‘juggling-home-and-business-life’ stress, and of course the general stress malaise of being cooped up in an unhealthy atmosphere with little in the way of exercise for long periods of time.

Are offices healthy places to work? Not particularly – but then, where is? Get a job in a gym and you’ll probably suffer sprains and strains from all the equipment, plus respiratory problems after years of breathing the exhaust fumes from too many pairs of sweaty trainers.

Stress can also make you more susceptible to any illnesses that are doing the rounds. Feeling generally unwell can induce stress.

Don’t despair, though – the good news is there’s a lot you can do to fight back. You can overcome this obstacle just like all the other problems of office life. All it needs is a little fine tuning and the same businesslike planning you apply to the rest of your job. For a start, look at the practical things that cause stress.

Eight Top Tips for a Healthier Office

Caroline Blaazer is a senior consultant at The Industrial Society, and an expert in health and safety at work. Here are her top tips for keeping your own work area as healthy as possible:

1 Adjust the screen of your VDU. The angle and direction of your screen are important to good posture. Remember you should be looking slightly down on it.

Also adjust the colour, definition and contrast. A screen that is too bright can be harsh on the eyes. Then use screen wipes to clean dust off your screen. Static on screens causes dust build-up.

2 Adjust your chair. The right height of chair is also vital to your posture. Remember to move about after forty-five minutes or so, and avoid letting your feet dangle as it is bad for the circulation of the legs.

3 Avoid Repetitive Strain Injury. Take the strain from your upper arms when you type and don’t rest your wrists on the desk. Caroline says the muscles in the upper arms are far better developed for coping with the strain of typing. Laptops are difficult, though, because it’s hard not to hunch over them.

Take a break every forty-five minutes and have a coffee or a walk around. Caroline advises clenching your fists, rotating your shoulders and looking into the distance as a vital muscle-reliever. ‘The musculo-skeletal system is not designed to take static loading,’ according to Caroline, ‘and you need to avoid the chance of it seizing up.’

A good tip would be to have a timer on your desk, set to bleep at each forty-five minute interval, in case you become too entrenched in your work.

Managers should be grateful when staff take small breaks like this as working quickly without pause tends to make work less accurate.

4 Get your eyes tested. Caroline suggests every two years, or as often as the optician guides you. Too many people get caught peering at their screen or paperwork.

5 Rearrange your work-station. When people allow their workplace to get cluttered, desk chaos ensues, together with associated stresses and strains such as painful backache which is aggravated as you reach for the phone, in the same awkward way, for the fiftieth time that morning. Caroline advises that you have the phone on your left side if you are right-handed, which leaves the right free to write messages.

According to Caroline, ‘Most office desks aren’t designed for a VDU and its cables. You could buy a bracket to store your keyboard out of the way when you’re writing, which will give you more space.’

The back legs of your keyboard should also be flipped out to provide a comfortable angle of working.

6 Plants. Plants in the office will moisten the air, which can otherwise get very dry. Humidifiers will also help with this problem, at the same time as soaking up some of the dust.

7 Lights. It’s possible to have too much light in an office, especially if you have bright, natural light competing with harsh ceiling lights. Caroline suggests removing one tube from fluorescent lights to soften them. Daylight can cause glare, which is why a filter in front of the VDU screen can be useful.

Caroline suggests up-lighting as the kindest to lights must always be fixed.

8 Decoration. Ideally, wall paint should be matt, as glare from a shiny desk or gloss walls can cause fatigue and stress. Caroline recommends light, rather than dark colours for walls, as dark walls will tend to appear closer to you and therefore more confining.

Stress symptoms lose some of their menace once you are able to identify them. Like most of the problems we are discussing in this book, the first step is to understand exactly what you are dealing with before you begin to combat it.

Perhaps the worst scenario is to suffer from stress in a state of bewilderment. If you have any of the following symptoms the first thing to understand is that you are horribly normal.