The drive to achieve, a high workload and wrong expectations of working life: it increasingly leads to work stress among young employees. That appears from figures from the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). In 2016, 17.1 percent of 25 to 35-year-olds experienced psychological fatigue as a result of work, in 2021 that was 23.4 percent. Indicators such as ‘work exhausted’, ’emotionally exhausted’ and ‘feeling empty’ also showed a strong increase. If stress complaints at work simmer for too long, then long-term absenteeism is a threat.
“Five years ago I rarely saw anyone under forty enter their second year of illness. But we are seeing more and more people in their twenties and young thirties who are taking a long break,” says Helma Schuldink, career advisor manager at Margolin, part of health and safety service provider Zorg van de Zaak. Last year, the long-term absenteeism was 20 percent higher than in 2020. Schuldink: “A tour of our career advisers shows that three quarters of this long-term absenteeism among people in their twenties and early thirties is psychological in nature, and often the result of work stress.”
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Causes of work stress
A high workload, little independence: according to Tanja Traag, chief sociologist at Statistics Netherlands, these are important causes of work stress. She sees that this stress plays a role in healthcare and education in particular. Due to staff shortages, the workload is high there, while employees usually have little room to organize their work themselves. In addition, a lot is demanded of employees. Not only through the work itself, but also through patients or (parents of) students. “In addition to being physically demanding, the work is also emotionally taxing, especially for employees who are still at the beginning of their career,” says Traag.
According to Schuldink, the fact that especially young employees seem to be susceptible to work stress also has to do with expectations. “Certainly in this overheated labor market, vacancies often promise all kinds of things. Nice working conditions, pleasant colleagues, a range of tasks in which you can develop. Then you go to work and in the first few years it turns out that it is mainly about hard sales. Moreover, in sectors such as healthcare and education, there is a culture that is not so much people-oriented, but mainly revolves around targets, reports and administrative burden. You can learn to deal with that, but I notice that especially young employees often get little room to make mistakes and learn. And that in a phase of life in which they are still fully developing an identity, struggling with life questions and above all do not want to fail.”
In addition, the line between work and private life has been blurring for years. Work is taken home because people are continuously available and online. In other words, they are always ‘on’.
The problem, stress expert Carolien Hamming said in an interview with NRCIt’s not so much the stress itself, but that we don’t recover enough from it. “While an alternation between exercise and recovery is necessary to stay healthy. If you do not recover sufficiently from previous activities, but you subsequently deliver a new performance, you build up a backlog. That delay makes us tired and ensures that we remain stressed,” says Hamming. Keep that up long enough without charging, and you risk burning out.
Most people, even with complaints, continue to work for far too long
Betting on prevention
Those who drop out with psychological complaints such as burnout, overstrain, depression or an anxiety disorder generally need a lot of time to recover. This is partly due to the fact that complaints often lie dormant for months at the time of failure. Schuldink: “Most people continue to work for far too long, even with complaints. Only when all reserves are exhausted do they sound the alarm. Then your battery is already so empty that it takes a lot of time and energy to recharge it. Moreover, it often takes a while before it is clearly identified where the problem lies. After that, the search is on for a treatment that works. The waiting lists in mental health care do not help.”
According to Schuldink, employers should therefore focus primarily on prevention. “Executives and HR employees have to paint a realistic and real picture of the work from the start. Work isn’t always fun: you have to prepare employees for that. Just like it is unlikely that someone will land a nice promotion within a year.”
Work stress can also be prevented by having more and better conversations, especially with young employees. “As soon as an employee is hired, little attention is paid to his career path. There is still much room for improvement in that area,” says Schuldink.
She advises employers to remain in constant dialogue. What tasks give you energy? What do you find heavy? Does this position actually suit you or would you do better elsewhere? “Many employers are hesitant to enter into that conversation, because they do not want to lose their employee. They think ‘don’t whine, just work’. But in doing so they increase the chance that an employee will be out of work for a long time. A risk that they really cannot afford in this overheated labor market.”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of 28 July 2022
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