Feeling Tense? You’re Probably Doing Your Job : Stress: As competition grows, so do workplace tensions. From boardroom to shop floor, everyone frets.

Working harder? Working faster? Feeling tense? Does your job seem less like the livelihood you once enjoyed and more like the sure-fire formula for a stomach ulcer?

You’re not alone.

A broad spectrum of the U.S. work force--from blue-collar workers to corporate chairmen, hospital nurses to flight attendants--struggles today with work that is faster, more tension-packed and, overall, more exhausting than it used to be.

“There are new pressures in the workplace, and they take a human cost,” declares Harley Shaiken, a professor of work and technology at UC San Diego.

Work and pressure have always kept close company. But lately, certain realities have been pounding the lone employee harder than ever.

Foreign competition is an abstract concept--until the threat of a shutdown hovers over your factory. Even for highly paid executives, job security has eroded sharply in an era of merger mania. At all levels of the job ladder, millions of people struggle with the migraine-inducing balance between work and child-rearing.

Not surprisingly, job-related stress claims have skyrocketed. And if anything, the varied pressures facing workers will increase in the coming years.

“I don’t think there’s any question that this is going on, and it will continue, and it’s going to accelerate,” said Eric G. Flamholtz, a professor of management at UCLA.

Many U.S. manufacturers, for instance, now race faster than ever to be first out with new products, a key to surviving in the increasingly global economy. At home, decontrol of airlines and other industries has meant that flight attendants now must cater to more passengers per flight and pilots spend more hours maneuvering through crowded skies.

“It’s a job that I don’t know if I could start today,” said Shirley Barber, an Irvine resident who has worked as a United Airlines flight attendant for 19 years.

The 1980s’ vogue of carving bloated companies into lean-and-mean corporate machines has left a trail of confused, emaciated labor forces in its wake. At the top levels, executives struggle as hard as ever for profit gains but with less job security than ever before.

And everywhere, it seems, workers scramble to keep up with technology, such as computers and facsimile machines, that enables them to finish work and deliver it to impatient customers more quickly than ever.

Certainly, such pressures aren’t all bad. “American industry doggone-right better start working harder if it’s going to keep up with the rest of the world,” said James McN. Stancill, a USC professor of finance.

Competition often results in lower prices and faster service. Higher living standards depend on productivity gains. And progress needn’t always take a human toll: Experts agree that the biggest improvements in personal performance are attained when people work smarter and not just harder .

Feverish Pace

Only, the ideal of working smart isn’t always met. The pressures to produce have transformed the climate of work in many places, creating “a feverish pace that seems to have emerged in the last three to five years,” said Edward Sanford, chairman of Pepperdine University’s economics, marketing and quantitative methods department. The stress level in business, he added, “is making life very obnoxious.”

At Cache Computers in the San Francisco Bay Area, the key to survival is rushing high-tech products to market faster than rivals in Asia and the United States. For employees, that often means 12-hour days as well as strict deadlines imposed on subcontractors: The performance of suppliers can make a crucial difference in a product’s profit.

Keeping up in the fast-paced world “is a little like trying to shoot ducks--and they’re coming off the pond quicker, one after the other,” observed Bill Fenley, vice president of sales and marketing at the Fremont firm.

Not that he’s complaining. “We’re all working harder, but at the same time, there’s the thrill of victory when you know you’ve done a good job,” Fenley said.

Unbridled competition is not all caused by the global economy. For many industries, operating inside the United States has gotten tougher. The deregulation movement, for instance, has subjected such once-stable industries as airlines, trucking, buses and telephone service to the jolt of new competition.

Employees feel it: For long-haul truckers, keeping to schedule has taken on new urgency. And airline employees--once the beneficiaries of predictable, secure employment--have gradually been squeezed harder by employers.

Consider flight attendants. At the time of 1978 airline deregulation, United Airlines’ DC-10s were equipped with 242 seats and employed up to 10 flight attendants per flight. Since then, United and its rivals have packed more and more seats into their jetliners.

Today, it’s not unusual for eight flight attendants to handle a United DC-10 with 287 seats. And that adds up to more bending, reaching, walking, stowing suitcases and other chores for a typical flight.

“I deliver a lot more things to a lot more people than I did before deregulation,” Barber said.

Cost Cutting

In the quest to cut costs, industries have tried various strategies. Typically, more is expected of employees.

Hospitals, for instance, have tried to combat health-care inflation by admitting only the truly sick for overnight stays. For nurses, this means a sharp rise in intravenous medications, dressing changes, careful monitoring and other sorts of care required by the acutely ill; virtually all patients are in serious shape.

In the early 1970s, by contrast, perhaps only two patients out of 10 were that sick, said Kay Davis, a nurse and health-care consultant in Los Angeles. “You’re looking at a drastic difference,” she said.

In other fields, new technologies have had the effect of an electronic poke in the shoulder to workers who once could take a bit more time. Take facsimile machines, which enable documents to be transmitted almost at once. While enormously convenient, the technology also can put new pressure on employees to finish work sooner than before.

“In the past, clients would say, ‘Give it to me in two days,’ ” said Michael Waldorf, a legal search consultant in Los Angeles. “Then there was Federal Express and overnight mail. Now people want it to be faxed. There’s just a much faster pace.”

Increasingly, technology serves as an all-knowing work monitor, toting up the number of keystrokes and corrections made by word processors, allowing supervisors to eavesdrop on telephone calls, even watching over the workplace and cafeteria with video cameras, according to a recent report by 9to5, the National Assn. of Working Women.

“Electronic snooping causes fear and stress, which leads to illness” rather than increased productivity, complains Karen Nussbaum, director of the Cleveland-based group, estimating that 10 million American workers now are subject to some form of electronic surveillance.

Leaner Staffing

A key change affecting corporate America in the 1990s is the reality of thinner work ranks in many places, a legacy of the cost-cutting and restructuring fever of recent years.

Since 1982, about 4.5 million Americans at all levels of the career ladder have lost their jobs because of restructuring, said Jerome M. Rosow, president of the Work in America Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Scarsdale, N.Y.

When the surgery is performed inartfully, say critics, employees pay the price. In their efforts to hop on the cost-cutting bandwagon, employers have been known to cut the wrong areas or fail to tell the remaining employees how they should absorb an increased work burden.

Shyam H. Gidumal, a vice president of the Boston Consulting Group in Los Angeles, recalled one case where a firm unwisely cut back its sales staff as much as its accounting staff, saddling its embattled sales force with an impossible load. “What’s happening is their customers aren’t getting called on,” he said.

In a sense, there’s nothing so unusual about today’s pressures. Work is tough, after all, and a nation’s gains in prosperity require major effort. The relatively worry-free period of U.S. economic dominance after World War II was far more peculiar than today’s climate, at least by historical standards.

For many younger Americans, these hard realities have yet to sink in. “I think we’re not yet working as hard as our parents and grandparents worked--or the foreign competition,” said Philip H. Birnbaum-More, 46, a professor of management at USC.

Yet, in some ways, workers today face forms of pressure that are quite different from the problems their grandparents contended with. More single parents than ever are attempting to balance the demands of work and family, for instance.

Moonlighting

Young mothers commonly try to hold on to jobs outside the home. Indeed, at a time when pay raises often lag inflation, moonlighting by women has reached record-setting rates, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. By the middle of last year, 5.9% of American women held two jobs--a five-fold increase since 1985.

“It’s never been that high,” said Audrey Freedman, an economist with the Conference Board, a business research organization in New York. “When the number first came through, the BLS thought there was some error, it was so high.”

In today’s transient society, harried parents scrambling to balance work and family demands often live far away from relatives who might lend a helping hand. The problem seems especially acute in California, where many people have close relatives in other parts of the country, said Bryan Lawton, a clinical psychologist who counsels employees at Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco.

Frequently, he said, workers feel like they have “too much to do and too little time.”

Mental stress claims against employers skyrocketed more than 500% in the 1980s in California and now cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually, according to the California Workers’ Compensation Institute. And although the state is more liberal in allowing such claims than most, workplace stress seems to have gone up everywhere, said Paul J. Rosch, president of the American Institute of Stress in Yonkers, N.Y.

In a March survey commissioned by Revlon Inc., 36% of respondents cited their work situations as the largest cause of personal stress, more than any other cause. “Most Americans quite clearly perceive they are under more stress than they were five years ago--and job stress is No. 1 on the list,” Rosch said.

Executives

The discomfort isn’t limited to those toiling at the lower rungs of the job ladder. Years of merger mania have eroded the security of executives who know they may be dumped if a takeover occurs. By some gauges, top executives seem more willing than ever to bail out of the corporate race.

Back in 1979, 17.3% of 1,708 top-level managers polled by Korn/Ferry International, a major executive search firm, said they expected to work as long as possible before retiring. But the gung-ho group is shrinking. Asked the same question last year, only 9.6% of 750 executives polled expected to work as long as they could.

“The destiny of the individual at the senior level is more in jeopardy than it has ever been--and it has little to do with how good a job he’s doing,” said Robert S. Rollo, Korn/Ferry’s managing director.

There may be no easy solution for some of the anxieties that employees face today, such as merger fears or the stress of juggling work and family. But certain things can be done to ease the pain, according to workplace experts.

Wells Fargo, Kaiser Permanente, Transamerica Life and many other companies now offer harried employees either counseling or other programs designed to help allay workplace stress. According to the American Institute of Stress, one firm reduced its annual workers’ compensation claims to $93,000 from $272,000 with the aid of a program that made use of meditation, biofeedback and muscle relaxation techniques.

In light of such financial realities, the California Workers’ Compensation Institute advises employers to identify--and eliminate--the causes of workplace stress. Among the worst: insensitive managers, unrealistic deadlines, insufficient training and failure to give workers the chance to share their views, a situation that leads to a sense of isolation.

“If you can spot the factors that lead to stress and deal with them, you’re better off than trying to manage it after it happens,” counsels Michael W. Jones, assistant general manager with the San Francisco-based organization.