Mental Stress And Fatigue In Retailing Company

Background of Retailing and CarryCart.com

Discuss about the Mental Stress and Fatigue in Retailing Company.

Occupational illness can be defined as the condition that might result from exposure in a workplace from various types of factors that may be physical, chemical as well as biological agents. These agents are seen to affect the physiological mechanisms of the body that results in affecting the health of the person and resulting in poor quality life (Montano et al., 2017). Present day generation is putting huge significance on the maintenance of health and safety in workplace. Maintaining health and safety of the employees is important and laws, policies and other initiatives need to be enacted to protect the well-being of the employees, visitors as well as customers (Toussiant et al., 2016). Researchers are of the opinion that looking after Health and Safety good business sense. Workplaces that neglect or avoid the health and safety risk prosecution are mainly seen to lose staff and thereby increase costs reducing profitability. Different types of occupational health hazards are mainly seen to affect the workers. Physical, chemical, biological, mechanical as well as psychosocial factors affect health of the employees (Moen et al., 2015). This assignment will mainly highlight one of the most important psychosocial hazard that most of the people in the nation of Australia are facing in their workplace and will thereby show how a proper health promotional plan will help to mitigate its negative effects.

Retail organizations have one of the most important objective of strengthening economic performance overcoming the several barriers of the given pressures from globalization, increase of internet and social media competition and thereby decreasing in the consumer spending which is mainly resulting from the global financial crisis. The retail sector is one of the major employers in the developed nations. In the nation of Australia, about 10% of the workforce accounting for about 1.2 million people is found to be employed in the retail sector. CarryCart.com is one of the most renowned internets retailing organization that is serving to near about every home in the nation of Australia (Schonfield et al., 2016). The consumers are seen to but different types or products starting from fresh vegetables and fruits to that of different clothes and apparels as well. However, the organization has developed one cost cutting strategy in response to the pressure of global financial crisis and increasing profitability is downsizing the workforce who is working together in each of the segments of the retaining organization. This rationalization process mainly results in creation of the instability as well as highly competitive retail work environment that becomes very stressful for the employees as well as other associated with poor psychological health and well being. A huge pressure of work which was previously shared with more number of employees are now shared with very few employees with the pressure on each one increasing as the same previous burden of work which was previously shared by many are now shared by very few. Poor psychological health as well as wellbeing is affecting the organizational outcomes like reduced productivity and increased absenteeism. The workers are 60% male and 40% females and are mostly seen to be young adults ranging from the age of 28 to about 45 years mostly with very few workers beyond working of the age 45 years. The workplace is comfortable with proper arrangements of seating positions and availability of important resources needed to complete the work but the working environment is quite strict. The working hours is quite long quite long for about 10 hours which most of the employees have to stretch as they cannot complete the work within the timeframe. Most of them have to take back their work to home resulting in affecting work life balance. The organizational culture is quite strict and hardly any of the members get time to engage with each other in informal talks or other discussions except work. Therefore, severe mental stress as well fatigue occurs among the employees resulting in poor quality life and loss of metal stability and physical disorders.

Factors Contributing to Mental Stress and Fatigue

On detailed analysis, a number of factors had been identified that were contributing to the development of mental stress and fatigue among the members working in the organization. The first factor that was recognized was the job as well as task demands. The employees were seen to be suffering from work overload. There was also lack of task control and many of the members stated that there was a lack of role ambiguity as well. As they had reduced the number of employees, a huge burden of work was put on each of the members. Many members had to work in roles that are different from what their designations dictate. Moreover, the second factor that was noted was that the organization also did not take any initiatives to help the professionals. Poor interpersonal relations as well as unfair management practices are seen to be two of other organizational factors that result in development of stress among the employees. Huge pressure also resulted from conflicts between the work as well as family roles and responsibilities and these resulted in affecting mental stability and created issues in personal relationships (Nelson & smith, 2016). These were other sources of mental stress among the members. As the organization was more involved in making the employees produce more productivity, they did not provide enough significance on the training of the individuals and there were lack of career development opportunities. These actually resulted in lack of opportunity for growth as well as promotion and hence it resulted in development of stress among the members, as they could not satisfy their ambitions. Moreover, a close analysis also revealed a number of important factors. These were the poor organizational climate. There was a complete lack of management commitment to different of the core values and most of the higher authorities were seen to change their versions depending upon the necessity of the situations. Conflicting communication styles were seen to be one of the most important reasons that resulted in development of miscommunication among the members and resulted in development of stress. Therefore, inadequate staffing levels, role ambiguity, long working hours, shift work as well as other factors were mainly resulting in such issues of mental stress among the employees (Wang et al., 2015). For identifying the presence or absence of stress in the in the workplace, four important initiatives were taken by the researchers. The first one was to effectively examine the workplace documents like that of the sick leave records, grievance information as well as the compensation claims of the workers. The second initiative that could also be taken is observing the workers while they are at work so that the individuals can observe their body language and distress (Jones et al., 2018). Thirdly, the researchers have communicated to the workers through feedback survey forms and analyzed the information that they got about the factors that are resulting them to create stress. Looking for factors among the members resulting in low work satisfaction and leading to psychological health issues would also help the professionals to know about the condition of the mental stability of patients. Low work satisfaction, poor work life balance as well as tensed relationship with each other and with the management also help to identify the presence of occupational health hazard in the organization (Krasikova et al., 2015). The management has no policies that help to monitor the mental health of the employees. However, they only have policies again harassments among genders with the zero tolerance policy for harassments at workplace. However, one scope of employees is present through the filling up of grievance form and submitting to the complaints department. Hardly any steps are taken that help the employees to discuss their issues with the management. In short, no policies are there that help the organization in analyzing the mental condition of employees effectively.

Identification of the Issue

Ethics associated with occupational health and safety states that it is extremely important for the organization to care for the individuals who are dedicating a large part of their day to the organization and helping the organization to meet its goals. Leading the organization with the sense of values as well as morality helps each of the members feel respected and cared by the organization. It is the ethical duty of the organizations to care for the safety and health of the employees and thereby conduct screenings to understand the vulnerabilities of the different employees to physical and mental instabilities (Lavecque et al., 2017). Some of the ethics those are extremely important for organizations to follow for maintaining work place safety and prevention for occupational health hazard like valuing for human lives, maintaining integrity, maintaining justice, thinking of the good for many and thereby ensure excellent health of all the professionals. Therefore, it is the ethical duty of the organization to care about the health of employees, who are providing their best performance for the organization. This organization is situated in the Australian Capital territory and therefore, it should maintain the work health safety act 2011 as well as work Health safety regulation 2011 (Kuehl et al., 2015). These laws are mainly aimed at protecting people’s safety as well as health at work by mainly imposing of the different obligations on differences of the parties who are mainly in the positions of successful contribution for effective management of the workplace risk. These laws are seen to cover the manufacturers as well as the suppliers of the equipments and the substances and at the same time provide effective rules for caring for the employers, workers, contractors as well as the others. Therefore, this organization should not overlook such legal requirements in the workplace and should implement strategies by which they can protect the people from facing such hazards effectively.

The health promotion program will be mainly based on four important approaches that would help to cover the entire aspects of the occupational health hazards so that the health of the employees are not vulnerable to any stress or mental issues. The first approach of the health promotion program would be the identification of the sources  that are causing the potential harm to the staff health as well as well being. The proper health assessment and screening tools would achieve this step. By these, the professionals can properly identify the facts that are leading to the stress (Joyce et al., 2016). This may include the examining the workplace documents of sick leave records as well as worker compensation claims and even grievance information. Observing the workers during the time of their working, using feedback survey forms on their causes of mental stress and for identification of the factors causing the mental health issues can also be followed. The second step would mainly involve the systematic assessment of the risks of the staffs that are being harmed (Martin et al., 2016). These would be followed by the third step called the effective development and implementation actions. These would be mainly addressing two important components. The first one would be addressing the workplace factors that are creating the risk of psychological injury. The second one is the minimizing of the impact of stress on the staffs through which supportive management and promotion of staff health and well-being. Under the first component, the steps that can be adopted by the professionals are implementation of the collective risk assessment and different types of management measures, adopting collective as well as individual preventive and different control measures, developing coping ability of the employees by increasing their control of the tasks. Allowing workers to participate in decision making, building social support system for them and enhancing the value placed on safety and health within the organization can also be ensured (Krause et al., 2015). For the second component, the organization should support a culture where employees’ voices are heard and steps are taken for their betterment. The HR should take more employees, reducing steps on each and this should be followed by strict legal requirements. Some of the stress management interventions that should be taken are training in coping strategies and giving enough scope for people for career growth, progressive relaxation, biofeedback, cognitive behavioral techniques, interpersonal skills and time management. This would be followed by the last approach that involves the effective evaluation of the different strategies of the health promotion program (Modrek et al., 2015). For effective evaluation, survey forms will again be developed in order to understand the level of satisfaction about the employees and even to understand their perceptions about the changes that had been brought to the organization. A screening session may be developed by which healthcare professionals would assess the mental health of the patients and can thereby help to understand whether the interventions are helping them to gradually overcome stress (Pohlling et al., 2016). The organization also needs to develop policy where fixation of the work hours, maintaining of their work life balances, scopes for grievance handling effectively and others should be developed.

Organizational Policies and Ethics

From the above discussion, it becomes quite clear that mental stress has huge a number of negative impacts on the health of the employees. These results in legal as well as ethical obligation and therefore the organization should try its best to mitigate the issues after recognizing the factors that are leading to the stress. With effective health promotion programs, the organizations can ensure healthy mental and physical status of the employees. These would help to increase productivity and help to meet the organizational mission and vision.

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