The job site CareerCast.com just released its survey of the best and worst jobs in America. This list includes measures of those jobs, or careers, that they found to be the most and least stressful as well. It is always interesting to see what jobs are listed on these kinds of reports; seldom does the list of the most and least stress-filled jobs make sense to everyone. To some, the list may even be insulting as they can seem to invalidate the experience of the vast majority of American workers who feel that they experience job stress.

It is important to note however, that an objective measure of a job being stressful or not, does not mean anything in particular to an individual at work. A job measured as high-stress may feel far less stressful to an employee than one classified as almost stress-free.

In other words, job stress can be a difficult variable to measure across broad populations. Stress, job based or not, is experienced on a subjective personal level – much like physical pain. As a result, it is virtually impossible to objectively measure job stress. What can be measured, and perhaps is what such studies attempt to measure is how many inherent stress factors a job contains.

The job stress experienced by individual workers is not necessarily based on the inherent stress-producing factors of the job.

A job or workplace that is not inherently difficult can be very stressful to individual employees. Workplace stress is not just related to set industry-related issues. Those pre-existing issues occur regardless of the individual worker, and can objectively cause a bodily stress reaction. As an example: firefighters are going to have a physiological reaction to the alarm announcing a call for help going off; the alarm is designed to interrupt whatever is occurring so that emergency personnel can respond in a timely manner. This stressor of the alarm is inherent to the job. As a result, the this particular job stress can be measured – all firefighters are going to have to deal with this workplace stressor.

However, employees everywhere, even those who do not have an inherently stressful workplace, have to cope with individual experiences. As a result, job stress can be experienced in any workplace, including those industries that are determined to be the least stressful.

Workers have to cope with countless work-related interactions and factors that can contribute to a difficult environment and unpleasant employee experience, regardless of industry factors. As a result employers from all industries need to proactively respond to job stress.

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Additional Reading

• Workplace Stress = Increased Heart Risk
• Distracted Employees & Presenteeism
• Most Difficult Job In America
• Employee Mediation Benefit Increases EAP Effectiveness
• Workplace Bullying
• You Don’t Have To Live With Workplace Woes
• Reducing Workplace Conflict: Employee Training

Related Posts:

• Workplace Conflict Whitepapers
• Workplace Behavior: What Defines An Ideal Employee?
• TSA & Employee Stress
• Workplace Bullying & Violence: TSA & Rolando Negrin
• Employee Stress & Workplace Conflict
• Staff Nurses and Workplace Conflict

Tags: Conflict Resolution, employee, Employee Benefits, employee stress, Workplace Conflict, workplace stress

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 24th, 2011 at 5:29 pm and is filed under Employee Benefits, Workplace & Business Conflict. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.