- 27/02/2013
- Posted by: essay
- Category: Free essays
The workplace of the 21st century differs greatly from the workplace just a few decades ago. On the one hand, technology and computerization have made simplified employees’ tasks, however, on the other hand, the rapid way of life and professional competition create permanent pressures for employees. Having great amounts of tasks, necessity to develop new skills and consonant competition with other workers create stressful situation for people at the workplace. Stress can become a precondition for other serious problems, such as drug addiction, alcoholism, emotional illnesses and others. It is very important to indicated harmful factors immediately and gat rid of them. The Department of Human Resources is usually responsible for these problems solution.
Human Resources should guide, motivate and help employee who have already faced these problems and organize and control prevention measures for other workers.
If you and people from your nearest surrounding have never faced this problem, it may seem that its significance and dangerous consequences are overestimated, however, statistics in recent year show that harmful factor at the workplace really require attention on the side of Human Resources and all workers.
Stress at the workplace usually becomes the leading factor of illness and abuse development. Some people try to deal with the stressful environment on the own and hide their emotions and feeling inside. This can lead to serious emotional problems and disorders which are often difficult to discover and treat. Among serious emotional problems which can be developed at the workplace modern diagnosticians and psychologists name depression, nervous disorder, gastritis, stomach ulcer and others. Some specialists even state that anorexia and bulimia, being psychological disorders, often have emotional background and can develop in the stressful surrounding.
Other people trying to get rid of stress try drugs and alcohol. Most people are encouraged by the first results – they feel the state of euphoria and relaxation and avoid real problems in such a way.
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However, consequences are usually terrible. The results of the statistics are frightening: about 70 percent of alcohol and drug abusers work today; one worker in three knows places where to get drugs in the workplace and one employee in four took drugs last year. “Americans consume 60 percent of the world’s production of illegal drugs: 23 million use marijuana at least four times a week; 18 million abuse alcohol; 6 million regularly use cocaine; and 2 million use heroin” (American Council). People who use drugs or are alcohol addicted have a tendency to reject and hide their substance abuse. If they do not painful bodily symptoms – withdrawal pains – they think that they can stop any moment, however, it is not true. Employees who regularly take cocaine, crack, heroine or marihuana may be psychically, as well as emotionally dependent.
Substance abusers create problems in the workplace not just for them but also for other workers. Their index of productivity is lower, so they reduce profit of the company and at the same time they increase risks of different accidents and assurance costs, as a result.
Human resource management may be very effective when dealing with stress among employees. Stress is a serious problem among employees and it causes many serious problems for the organizations. At the present moment there is no legislative mechanism which would protect employees from stressed they experience at the work places. “The stress response must be regarded, at one level, as psycho physiological: a psychological response that has a corresponding physiological response. We cannot carry out adequate model building, however, without understanding the interaction of these processes with broader socio-cultural and political processes” (Masters, p. 24)
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