This installment of “People on the Street” involves a husband and wife: Tim and Kara.  We’ve learned from experience that when someone thinks their work sucks, it doesn’t just affect them - it affects people around them, too.  With that in mind, in this post, you’ll hear Tim’s account of his entry into a new work environment and how the focus on time progressively became too much to handle.  You’ll also hear Kara’s account of what she was witnessing as Tim became more and more dissatisfied.

In Part 2 on Friday, you’ll hear how reading Why Work Sucks affected Tim and Kara’s life and the life of their family.

Video #1: Tim’s new job

[About five months ago, Tim got a new job.  Shortly after entering the work environment, he was reprimanded for coming in 2 minutes "late" and leaving 2 minutes "early". He was also "checked on" by his boss no less than 12 times a day.  And the stress level began to rise...]

Video #2: Tim: My work sucks

[Tim went to HR to express his unhappiness and was told to go back to the grind.  He continued to be reprimanded for how he used his time - to the point of feeling guilty about going to the bathroom.]

Video #3: Kara’s view of Tim

[Immediately after the new job started, Kara noticed that the Tim she knew was slipping away.  He was withdrawn, crabby, cold, and short-tempered.]

When you’re in a less than stellar work situation, how do your relatives/friends perceive you?  Or, if you have a relative or friend in a stressful work situation, how have you seen them change?

It gets better for Tim and Kara - we promise.  Stay tuned for Part 2…

The other day we ran across some interesting numbers from a Watson Wyatt survey. It seems that a percentage of the companies surveyed are aware that certain aspects of their work cultures cause stress, and that employee stress is having a negative impact on the company’s bottom line. Unfortunately, in each category, the percentage of employers who are actually responding to this problem is always lower than the overall awareness level. (One wonders if they would call the fire department if their office park were engulfed in flames.)

It’s galling that an organization could acknowledge that their company is a stressful, counterproductive place to work and yet not do anything about it. But that’s not the part of the survey that got us all riled up. Instead, we’re wondering about the companies that DON’T EVEN KNOW they have a problem.

Only 32% can see how a lack of work-life balance is hurting their people and their business? Are you kidding? Less than half can see that working longer hours, and doing more work with fewer resources, is a problem? Pardon our French, but WTF?

It’s this kind of incredible blindness that motivates us to continue to speak out on these issues. It’s this kind of blindness that has us calling for a revolution in how we work. We can’t expect the leaders at the top to wake up to the realities of working in the 21st Century. It’s up to us to make the workplace a more sane and humane place for everyone. No one is going to give it to us.

Thanks very much to Harriet Traxler for the tip on this:

Sound the alarm! Microsoft wants to hook you up to your computer to monitor your “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure.” And we thought the stress mouse was bad.

You can read the scores of reactions to this story, and we’re in agreement about the privacy issues, but we also think there is something larger happening here. What bothers us more is the idea that the role of the workplace in people’s lives has expanded to the point where it has invaded territory traditionally owned by friends, families, communities, and so forth.

We’re all for health and safety standards at work. What we don’t like is this idea that work is supposed to take care of you, or that work is the place where you have the strongest social network, or that work is where you find your identity.

One of the benefits of a ROWE is that it downplays the role of work in people’s lives. Of course your job should still make you money, and can still bring you fulfillment as a career. But in a ROWE, people rediscover aspects of their lives and their selves that they had forgotten because they had gotten too bound up in work.

Work-life balance is about more than time. It’s really about creating a healthy balance among all aspects of your life. You can reject workplace spyware, but don’t stop there. Reject anything about your job that takes away from you being you.

We ran across this recent blog post about a new technology that would help people recognize when they were stressed at the office. We thought this was funny, and perhaps a little chilling, that people would turn to their mouse to tell them they were about to blow a gasket.

We have another tool you could use to tell you if you’re stressed—it’s called the human body. The fight-or-flight response is a robust but also well-calibrated tool for responding to external or internal stressors. In other words, when you’re stressed, you don’t need a computer to tell you. You need only acknowledge the misery that you’re already experiencing.

The bigger issue is how you respond to that stress. There are countless relaxation techniques that you can try, but the best thing you can do to eliminate stress is to remove the stressor. If you’re stuck in a rigid, inhumane work schedule, you can do all the deep breathing or desk yoga you want, but there is no substitute for having the freedom to live and work the way that suits you best.

We don’t need another workplace Band-Aid. We need the workplace to catch up with the times.

There is a very sad story that’s been going around about a Toyota worker who died–on the job, at 4 am–of overwork. As this version notes, he had put in 106 hours of overtime the month he died.

The Japanese word for what happened to Mr. Uchino is karoshi. Karoshi first surfaced as a phenomenon in the 1980s and the media takes it semi-seriously. A worker’s death is not taken lightly, but the idea of death from overwork often comes off as an oddity, an extreme consequence of the (sometimes) extreme work culture found in corporate Japan.

We say that while the outcome is extreme, the fundamental forces behind karoshi are not unique to Japan, nor are they to be taken lightly. People die at work in Japan because of stress. Even if stress isn’t literally killing us in the rest of the world, we would be foolish to think that the stress of playing the game of work doesn’t take its toll.

The American Institute of Stress has a nice page on the economic and social effects of job stress. The AIS nicely expresses the human and business costs of stress, but we’re not waiting for the right number to come along and tell us that work is broken. And we’re also not going to wait for work to start killing people. A Results-Only Work Environment means that people don’t have to tolerate harmful work stress. There is an alternative and the time has come for people to use it.