“Who killed Davey Moore?Why an’ what’s the reason for?” 1It was sixty years ago that Bob Dylan wrote a song about Davey Moore, an American boxer who died due to inoperable brain damage after a prize fight. Running through the list of possible culprits (including the referee, the angry crowd, Moore’s manager, the bettors, the sportswriters and the opposing boxer) Dylan leaves us without a single choice. The song came flooding back to me as I contemplated the recriminations and denials over a life cut short tragically early owing to workplace stress.2
The factors that contributed to this tragedy prevail in so many corporates that there is no assurance against recurrences. Beneath the reported surface, there are multiple cases of overwork and breakdown occurring in the highly exploited GIG, contract and unorganized labour force which do not have the kind of parental, peer and press outspokenness that made the headlines in this one.
While overwork is clearly at the core of the case, there are at least eleven other factors that we need to consider. In making a more complex (and, hopefully, more accurate) analysis of human disasters we’ll rely on the ‘Swiss cheese’ model used by James Reason for disasters on a much larger scale. “…[T]he performance of those at the sharp end (who may or may not have made errors, but mostly did) was shaped by local workplace conditions and upstream organisational factors… [Reason] depicted these as a sequence of five ‘planes’ lying one behind the other.”3 We shall limit ourselves to using three planes and adopt the analogy of solar photography rather than that of ‘Swiss cheese’.
Assume organisations wish to photograph the sun after it has crossed the comfortable viewing times of sunrise and sunset. Intervening between the sun and the camera’s sensor are the glass elements of the lens (the Job Plane in our analogy) and the electronics that determine how much light will be allowed to pass through the aperture as well as how sensitive the sensor will be (the Person Plane for us). In addition, there are intermediate filters to mitigate the effect of the sun’s rays (the Track Change Plane). Each of the planes has a central component and three auxiliary ones. These twelve work together, either to yield a beautiful sun image or burn the sensor and perhaps even blind the image-making organisation.
The job plane
1. Central to our analysis must lie the amount and nature of work expected from an individual. If the quantity is excessive, it will create a lens opening so wide that it will be difficult to prevent the sun’s rays from burning out the sensor. Work maxima can follow different principles.
Time limited work: To prevent work demands from being overwhelming, unions fought long and hard battles to limit the number of hours worked by employees. “The most popular labour song in the US in the 1860s, ’70s, and ’80s was ‘Eight Hours’ and this is how … [its chorus] went:
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest Eight hours for what we will …” 4Work beyond time limits is subject to a ceiling and is compensated by the payment of overtime.
Result limited work: The piece rates that time-based wages displaced are once again tending to reappear, particularly in the Gig space. In such cases, overwork appears to be voluntary but is, in fact, forced by low (and, sometimes, declining) piece rates or platform denial if the supposed right to work only as much as one likes is exercised.
Unlimited work: For many who are particularly vulnerable (contract workers, trainees etc.) no practical limit (other than eyelids not remaining open) is imposed and much depends on the attitude of the employer.
The impact the quantity of work has on the doer is hugely influenced by its quality. Herein lies the explanation to the counter-examples given by captains of industry who recount their own crazy work hours without (apparent) harm. An earlier column has explained at length how the innate pleasure yielded by some types of work, the freedom to carry it out autonomously, the purpose driving the effort or the learning it yields (no, not just learning to make back-breaking effort) can act as the solar filter in our example, mitigating the harshness of even over-large loads.5 Contra-wise, quality-of-work factors can turn negative and make the work:
Monotonous, micro-managed or distasteful
Purpose-starved or directed to a purpose dissonant with the individual’s values
Void of learning or destructive of what has already been learned,
These work-quality degraders act, in our model, as light concentrators instead of filters, with hugely detrimental effects on the employee.
2. Next in importance only to the work is the impact the supervisor or unit head can have.
The supervisor can enhance or degrade the value exchange ratio an employee enjoys with the organisation. S/he can make mundane work almost palatable or turn potentially joyful work poisonous.
The supervisor can also go outside the normal organisational exchange equation and become an extra source of social and developmental support for the employee. S/he can, on the other hand, extract work that is personal in nature or serves the political agenda of the leader.6
Interactiions with the supervisor (particularly in public) can be inspiring and uplifting or depressing and demeaning. Public humiliation is often the most traumatic part of work stress.
3. People work for ROE (Returns On Effort) from the company. These are moderated by the security of continued employment. Returns can get vitiated, thereby delivering another solar scorcher, for several reasons.
Too high a return relative to the market value for a role can itself cause stress as it traps the employee. Several firms use such golden handcuffs while making unreasonable result (and excessive time) demands on employees.
The more obvious stressor is the feeling of being shortchanged when ROE is inadequate.
Perhaps the most stressful and unfair ROE situation is when there is fear the employment may be cut short at any time, not for shortfall in goal achievement or anything the employee can do, but because some shareholder value maximizer feels an emplocide emetic would be good for the company.7
4. The last potential stressor lens on the Job Plane is the one that makes work extra difficult or risky.
Physical working conditions are the prime culprit here. They may not affect too many white-collar employees but are the bane of platform-dependent Gig workers or those contracted to construction sites and engaged in strenuous or hazardous production processes.
Inadequate or missing preparatory training can make work needlessly difficult and inefficient.
Lack of guidance can also impact safety. An equal, if not greater, source of accidents are poor processes, improper or faulty equipment and the pressure to cut corners.
The person plane
5. Much as organisation apologists would like to shovel blame on the collapsing individual, I cannot find myself in sympathy with efforts to make a thick skin an essential attribute for corporate existence. There are plenty of studies linking personality traits to stress tolerance but most causal chains are tenuous and intermediated. “Literature suggests that neuroticism and conscientiousness are highly correlated to perceived stress. Similarly, extraversion, agreeableness and openness to experience also have some effect on job stress. However, these relationships are considered to be complex, with modest effects, and/or are poorly understood.” 8
No skin is thick to the point of being impervious. Just because people don’t die, commit suicide or suffer obvious mental breakdowns does not mean they are not suffering invisible and irreversible damage. To make matters worse, work extracted in this fashion is bound to be of poorer quality and performed far less efficiently.
Similarly, I cannot join the ranks of those advocating spiritual solutions and soul-strengthening as the prime cures for all work-originated stress. By putting the onus on employees, they let corporates permitting preventable psychological or physical harm off the hook. Without absolving the organisation of the responsibility to reduce work stress, however, some personal support systems should be encouraged.
6. Turning to a counsellor in moments of extraordinary stress has prevented many a tormented soul from physical or mental collapse. As I had pointed out in a column written after a highly regarded CEO took his own life, the greatest preventive to seeking such professional help is the stigma of being seen as unable to ‘take it’. The same column suggested a platform which uses AI to carry out initial anonymous diagnoses and progresses through online guidance from qualified counselling and medical practitioners to actual in-person consultations.9
7. A close friend at work can provide tips and tricks for dealing with tough tasks and beastly bosses. S/he can also be an invaluable first source of comfort and even some rudimentary counselling when the going gets stormy. A friend who is sensitive to an approaching breakdown can either insist the hesitant individual seek help or personally take on the task of talking to HR or up the hierarchy, circumventing the pressure creator. S/he can also alert the individual’s family.
8. The bottling-up types, who usually reveal little (till they implode), keep the seriousness of their troubles from their families too. Whether through the hint of a work friend or the sixth sense of a spouse/parent, familial support can go a very long way in preventing a tense time from becoming a tragedy. Where families cannot provide such support or add tensions of their own, long-cultivated habits of learning, service and hobbies can also reduce the torment of work stress. “For this reason, the best alternative engagement boats steer clear of both the work and home coasts.”10
The track change plane
9. Persons who insist the younger generation should face inhuman work conditions because they claim they did, retain fond memories of studying Casabianca in school.11 Others, who wish to be more sparing of the lives of our younger generation than Luc-Julien-Joseph Casabianca, should find mechanisms that mimic a circuit breaker’s function. When it trips, it is best to repair or replace the device that caused the tripping rather than use a thicker wire across the breaker till the device burns out and causes a fire. Retreat is not always cowardly. Simply having circuit breakers in place, even if they are not used, can be reassuring stress busters. On the other hand, their absence and the attitude that takes pride in having no escape avenues converts these factors into sensor burners.
10. A mechanism for moving to another job within the organisation can be a very effective track-changer. At one company where I worked, we had a robust process for internally advertising all job vacancies, before resorting to cadre placements or external recruitments. It provided a relatively friction-free way for people to change their learning opportunities, levels, bosses, functional specializations or locations. The eagerness for ready-made external recruits has atrophied or eliminated such mechanisms which deserve resuscitation.
11. Another recourse, which individual contributors and operatives used to have, was a union independent enough to say, ‘Enough is enough’, when people were being tormented by their supervisors or had excessive pressures. The old unions have virtually vanished, certainly in white-collar environments, but there are blueprints for institutionalizing new types.12
12. Perhaps the most heart-rending scene in 1984 is the one where Winston realizes that O’Brien, who he took to be on his side, owed loyalty only to ‘the Party’.13 In recent days, there have been scores of overworked employees who have publicized their disappointment when they turned to HR for succour. The majority reported the same rebuff as Winston received from O’Brien. Ideally, HR should be aware of pressure pockets on its own and move severely stressed employees out of harm’s way.14 Moreover, if the same supervisor remains the origin of too many stress-SOSs, HR must activate the 3 Cs (Counselling, Coaching or Chopping).
Righting the balance
There can obviously be no single answer to the issue of work stress. Each organisation needs to figure out which of the dozen factors reviewed above it must tackle first, all the while resisting temptations to resort to quick and dirty routes such as the elder sibling subterfuge of desensitizing the sensor. There is one-directional push, however, that could be universally applicable.
After decades when labour laws were exploited to the detriment of productivity and organisational effectiveness, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction now and uncontrolled work demands have resulted in noxious workplaces where tragedies are just waiting to happen. Excessive demands on the time and effort of people have to be dialled back. Anything more than an eight-hour day in a five-day week should demand special justification. The reasoning behind these (and even lower) limits are contained in a previous column.15 Of course, there will be exigencies demanding more time at work (or remotely) but the organisation must pay for these as well as for weekend work (which must also get compensatory leave within a reasonable period). If such excess work demands are too frequent, the level of contingency buffers must be raised instead of the increasingly common games organisations play with both overtime limits and rates, to slash even the bare minimum headcount. Corporates recruiting enough people to prevent overworking a few would provide a huge boost to employment in the formal sector of the economy and permit them to make a greater contribution to the nation than almost anything else they could do.
What if individuals are eager to work more hours because they revel in their work and the organisation’s mission enthuses them as does their desire to learn and achieve? They should certainly not be prevented from distinguishing themselves by their enthusiasm and diligence. Yet the touchstone for this must be true volunteering. There are many ways to confirm whether the extra time is self-initiated. A simple test would be significant variations among employees in the time they spend beyond the prescribed hours. Similarly, inter-team differences can reveal hot-spots of unspoken pressures to sit late or attend on weekends.
None of these telltale signs of freedom to grow vs. pressure to churn out routine will be obvious if the entire organisation has caught the people exploitation bug. The test for this is equally simple: Is HR focused on maximizing employee happiness because the CEO is committed to it? A previous column gets into details of how this can be done. “I was fortunate to work under a Chairman [Sumant Moolgaokar] who chose to be the missing voice of the customer within the company and insisted on service complaints being systemically resolved regardless of the cost and fought every Rupee increase in product price with a fierceness that turned pleaders for price increases to putty.”16 CEOs who champion employees, question persistent time encroachments beyond the norm and demand people happiness from their CHROs (as stridently as Sumant Moolgaokar championed customers when there was no market or regulatory pressure to do so) will be the true heroes of India’s economic progress.Notes:
Bob Dylan, Who killed Davey Moore, The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall, released in 2004.
Web Desk, The Week, EY executive Anna Sebastian contacted HR wing for help, manager glorified toxicity: Friend recollects last call hours before her passingAnna’s mother Anitha had tried to convince the EY Manager and Assistant Manager of her daughter’s health but there was no response, Updated: 19 September 2024.
James Reason, Erik Hollnagel and Jean Pariès, Revisiting the ‘Swiss Cheese’ Model of Accidents, Journal of Clinical Engineering, January 2006.
Visty Banaji, India Eagerly Awaits a Sixer, Angry Birds, Angrier Bees – Reflections on the Feats, Failures and Future of HR, Pages 277-254, AuthorsUpfront, 2023.
Visty Banaji, ‘If you want people to do a good job, give them a good job to do’, Angry Birds, Angrier Bees – Reflections on the Feats, Failures and Future of HR, Pages 237-244, AuthorsUpfront, 2023.
Visty Banaji, The Dogs of (Office) War, Angry Birds, Angrier Bees – Reflections on the Feats, Failures and Future of HR, Pages 371-377, AuthorsUpfront, 2023.
Visty Banaji, Countering the merchants of emplocide, People Matters, 10 February 2023, (https://www.peoplematters.in/article/employee-relations/countering-the-merchants-of-emplocide-36862).
Sujit Sur and Eddy S Ng, Extending Theory on Job Stress: The Interaction Between the ‘Other 3’ and ‘Big 5’ Personality Traits on Job Stress, Human Resource Development Review, Vol. 13(1) 79 –101, 2014.
Visty Banaji, Corporate India’s Mental Health Crisis, Angry Birds, Angrier Bees – Reflections on the Feats, Failures and Future of HR, Pages 267-276, AuthorsUpfront, 2023.
Visty Banaji, Work-life balance is a misleading mirage, People Matters, 10 August 2023, (https://www.peoplematters.in/article/employee-relations/work-life-balance-is-a-misleading-mirage-38657).
Felicia Dorothea Hemans, Casabianca, The Monthly Magazine, Vol 2, August 1826
Visty Banaji, The Future of Trade Unions, Angry Birds, Angrier Bees – Reflections on the Feats, Failures and Future of HR, Pages 325-333, AuthorsUpfront, 2023.
George Orwell, 1984, Penguin 2004.
Visty Banaji, HR is a Contact Sport, Angry Birds, Angrier Bees – Reflections on the Feats, Failures and Future of HR, Pages 127-134, AuthorsUpfront, 2023.
Visty Banaji, India Eagerly Awaits a Sixer, Angry Birds, Angrier Bees – Reflections on the Feats, Failures and Future of HR, Pages 277-254, AuthorsUpfront, 2023.
Visty Banaji, HR’s Business Should Be Happiness Raising, Angry Birds, Angrier Bees – Reflections on the Feats, Failures and Future of HR, Pages 488-496, AuthorsUpfront, 2023.