Convenience

276
Part 4:
Leading
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TOUGH TIMES, TOUGH CHOICES
When Stress Becomes Too Tough to Handle
In November 2009, Jason Rodriguez, a former
employee of an engineering firm in Orlando, Florida,
entered the company’s offices and opened fire with
a handgun, killing one person and wounding five
others. Rodriguez had been fired from Reynolds,
Smith & Hills less than two years earlier and told
police that he thought the firm was hindering his
efforts to collect unemployment benefits. “They left
me to rot,” he told a reporter who asked him about
his motive.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the
incidence of workplace violence has actually been
trending down over the past few years, in part
because employers have paid more attention to the
problem and taken successful preventive measures.
More and more companies, for example, have set up
employee assistance programs
(
EAPs
) to help work-
ers deal with various sources of stress, but EAP pro-
viders report that, in the current climate of economic
uncertainty, they’re being asked to deal with a differ-
ent set of problems than the ones they’ve typically
handled in the past.
In particular, financial problems have replaced
emotional problems as employees’ primary area of
concern, and with unemployment totals approaching
27-year highs, American workers appear to be
more worried about the future than about such con-
ventional stressors as pressing deadlines and
demanding bosses. Today, says Sandra Naiman, a
Denver-based career coach, “off- and on-the-job
stresses feed into one another” to elevate stress
levels all around, and workplace stress during the
current recession may reflect this unfamiliar conver-
gence of stressors.
As yet, no hard data exist to connect workplace
violence with economic downturns, but many
professionals and other experts in the field are con-
vinced that the connection is real. ComPsych Corp.,
©
m
icro10x/
S
hutterstock.com
Excessive stress can become very debilitating. This executive, for example, is clearly experiencing
anxiety and frustration due to the pressures of her job—deadlines, tight budgets, problems with
subordinates, and increased business competition. Occasionally, stress becomes so great that
some people react with aggression and violence.
(
continued
)