Stress hits again or The Five Year Syndrome.

I read that a UK business magazine published a study on managers’ resistance to job stress.  According to this study, women managers break after five years on the job.  M ale managers resist longer but they lose creativity and energy after the five year period.

Five years equal some 55 months work or 1,210 days, or 9,680 hours on average.

STRESS ON THE JOB
One would therefore assume that a manager’s career is very much the same as that of athletes.

Why women break and males endure a little longer is not explained by the above study.   I can only think that women are smarter and say ‘no’ to the stress.  Males use their self-pride to stay longer on the job.  But, males also die sooner.

According to my calculation, a manager begins to feel stress at thirty years of age.  Remember, that is after 3 + 5 + 5 +5 = 18 years of school and some 5 years of specific on-the-job training.  That is in raw numbers, 23,760 hours, to which the more or less five years training have to be added.

The difference between the input and the output is dramatic in terms of numbers of hours.  One can only reach a few conclusions: either the school system is barely effective or the way organizations use their managers is an unsustainable resource.

The school systems can hardly be changed.  They are in the hands of governments so  they are almost untouchable.

So, hiring a fresh university graduate aged twenty-five means that a company has to specifically train him or her for a couple of years and pay the employee as well.

At the current EU prices, figures between thirty-five and forty thousand Euros per year would be reasonable.

RETURN ON INVESTMENT
What’s the company’s / organization’s expectation for a Return on Investment (ROI)?

And Society’s ROI expectation?

When I audited pre-university graduation schools for ISO 9001 certification and I asked their managers for their knowledge of their customers’ requirements, they looked at me as if I came from Mars.  They identified their customers from data supplied by the Italian Ministry of Education.   They simply did not bother to investigate, know, analyze, understand what jobs the local companies and organizations were going to offer – or not – to the boys and girls graduating from school.

If I went back to those schools and asked their managers about their knowledge of their non-graduates or graduates stress endurance, I would be looked at as if I came from Mars again.

MORE HUMANITARIAN HIRING
Companies’ and organizations’ managers have therefore to be – or made to be – well aware of the risks their employer will incur when hiring new managers.

The questionnaires I had to fill and the interviews I was subject to when applying for a job simply did not address this very critical feature – stress on the job.

Sure once a manager – male or female – has been hired and has worked with a company for five years, it is very hard and heart breaking to kick him or her out.

If there is a way out of this maze of stress, I would suggest employees speak honestly to their manager in order to analyze his / her performance together.  Does he or she know the company very well  and its options.  If things aren’t working out, then suggest to your  manager a different, reasonable job.  Or, let the manager counter-suggest or offer options. Stress is simply not worth the toll it takes on us.