Employees working in engineering and telecom sector contributed 9 per cent and 8 per cent respectively in the questionnaire. Nearly 6 per cent of the employees belonged from market research/KPO and media background each. Management, FMCG and Infrastructure sector employees share is 5 per cent each, in the total survey. Respondents from power and real estate sector contributed 4 per cent each. Employees from education and food& beverages sector provided a share of 3 per cent each. Advertising, manufacturing and textiles employees offered a share of 2 per cent each in the survey results. 

The shift work defined as evening shifts, irregular or unspecified shifts, mixed schedules, night shifts and rotating shifts. The survey also contained day workers or the general population for comparison. Shift work was associated with a 52 per cent increased risk of heart attack, 28 per cent rise in coronary events and 10 per cent extra strokes. 

A workplace ethics survey of 1,121 managers and HR professionals, conducted by the Human Resources Institute, found that managers and HR professionals believe the leading factors that cause unethical corporate behavior are: pressure to meet unrealistic business objectives and deadlines, desire to further one's career, and the need to protect one's livelihood.


RECOGNIZE THE PROCESS

Physical: Your first symptoms are unusual tiredness and exhaustion. Either there is no time to eat or sleep or excess of either. That is nature reacting to stress. Soon your health deteriorates and you may experience multiple ailments like headaches, irritable bowels, skin infections and bouts of sickness.

Emotional: If you are a high achiever, this starts with an obsession to prove yourself against other achievers. Small mishaps lead to feelings of failure and self-doubt while successes do not give any added satisfaction. You feel isolated and lonely and then cynical and intolerant.

Behavioural: Unlike the physical and emotional symptoms, change in behaviour is evident to others. Behavioural changes include avoiding social contact for want of time, depending on food, alcohol, tobacco or drugs to cope with stress or avoiding work through procrastination or absence.

There are several signs and symptoms that you may notice when you are experiencing stress. These signs and symptoms fall into four categories: Feelings, Thoughts, Behavior, and Physiology. When you are under stress, you may experience one or more of the following: 

WHAT CAUSES BURNOUT?

Your burnout is usually a result of a combination of your current job, daily routine and your outlook towards circumstances. At work, if you feel that you have no control over outcomes, you are facing job uncertainty, a demanding environment or are stuck in a monotonous role with no recognition or reward— you could be heading towards a burnout.

Similarly, your lifestyle accelerates a burnout when you spend excessive time at work at the cost of your personal off-time, health and social engagements, lose the emotional support of close relationships and choose to do everything yourself without engaging your team. The highly ambitious and aggressive Type A personalities experience burnouts more often. A need for power, refusal to share the spotlight, need for perfection, reluctance to delegate or a pessimistic attitude results in faster burnouts

Both positive and negative events in one's life can be stressful. However, major life changes are the greatest contributors of stress for most people. They place the greatest demand on resources for coping. 

CURE AND RECOVERY

At the personal level, choose positive social connections to make a speedy recovery. If you are experiencing a burnout, reach out to friends or loved ones who can provide you with great listening. Venting out, being heard and understood not only relieves stress but also deepens the relationship. A professional counsellor too works in a similar way and can be immensely helpful. At the workplace, avoid negative people and invest in positive relationships. Choose a social cause or a group that interests you to give new meaning to work and build additional social connections.

At the organisational level, as a leader help a colleague recover from a burnout by providing a mentor or manager to serve as a sounding board and recommending professional counselling through HR. Simultaneously address immediate causes of burnout like balancing workload, increasing individual control over outcomes and rewards and providing resources where required.

PREVENTION

Preventing a burnout is far better than recovering from one! As a team leader, promote values and processes that both colleagues and the organisation can agree upon. These should relate to individual and teamwork, fairness, reward and control mechanisms. At a personal level, take charge of lifestyle choices and how you look at the world around you. Reassess your priorities to include health and relationships. In your daily routine, schedule in healthy eating habits, daily exercise, adequate sleep and time with loved ones. Take weekly time out to relax, engage in hobbies and switch off from technology.

A healthy and social routine reduces stress. Next, work on your attitude towards your current job and career or switch tracks if that doesn’t help. Find either meaning or enjoyment from tasks that you do—including coffee breaks with colleagues. Additionally, focus on meaning or enjoyment from your non-work life including your family and personal interests. Invest in building professional relationships and not simply transactional ones. . Finding meaning in life and bonding with people is the best way to prevent burnouts.

Many stresses can be changed, eliminated, or minimized. Here are some things you can do to reduce your level of stress: 

The Supreme Court of India in its ruling on a suicide case said that a senior employee cannot be held responsible for the death of his junior because of stress at work. The case belong to the death of Kishor Parashar, a Maharashtra government employee, who committed suicide in the month of August 2017. Setting aside the argument put forth by the Bombay High Court's Aurangabad bench, the Supreme Court of India said there's insufficient evidence which could suggest it as a case of abetment to suicide. The apex court, however, said there can be a "room" for Section 306 (abetment to suicide) of the Indian Penal Code if a suicide-like situation is created deliberately.

Kishor's wife had complained to the police of Aurangabad after his death, accusing the deputy director of education for forcing him to work overtime and even on holidays. She had alleged the senior officail/officer mentally tortured her husband and created extreme working conditions, following which he decided to end his life. She also accused the official for stopping her late husband's salary as well as threatening not to give him increment. Following the complaint, the local police lodged an FIR against the said official, who later moved the local bench of the Bombay High Court for quashing of the FIR.

The Bombay High Court on January 23 decided that the FIR could not be quashed and that the case could come under the Section 306 of the IPC. The HC, in its observation, gave two arguments. The court said though the senior officer didn't have any such intention, cases wherein victims are deliberately forced to work under extreme conditions which forced them to take extreme step can come under the abetment of suicide.


The senior officer who approached the Supreme Court of India after the Bombay High Court observation got a relief after the Supreme Court bench comprising justices Arun Mishra and UU Lalit termed the lower court observation as untenable and rejected the FIR. "It is true that if a situation is created deliberately so as to drive a person to commit suicide, there would be room for attracting Section 306 of the IPC (abetment to suicide). However, the facts on record in the present case are inadequate and insufficient (to reach that conclusion)," the Supreme Court observed (Order dated May 17, 2018). Maharashtra government's standing counsel Nishant Katneswarkar had appealed to the SC that the case should be dismissed as the senior officer had no intention to force the victim to commit suicide.

-Rilind Elezaj

If you are like many people, you only associate stress with negative things such as depression, weakened immune system, and fatal diseases such as heart attack and high blood pressure. But did you know that there is a positive side of stress? I know that this is hard to believe but trust me, it is scientifically proven.

Before you disagree, though, have you ever been stressed out in an exam room because a question was too tough for your liking? How did your brain respond? Were you challenged and motivated- at the same time- to think harder and focus more on your subsequent exams? Well, if you answered yes, then you definitely have benefited from stress, one way or another. However, the benefits of stress are evident, alright, but it is only if you don’t let it get out of hand. That is why you need to contact a life coach whenever you feel overwhelmed by stress.

It is safe to say that if stress isn’t chronic yet, then it could have more benefits than harm. Here are 5 more benefits of stress that you probably take for granted.

1.Boosting memory
Small chunks of stress can help you memorize more content than you usually do. This is because when your mind registers that you are overwhelmed by a particular task, nothing will ever erase that memory from you. And when you finally get a solution to the challenge, the solution sticks to your brain. So when you are faced by a similar challenge later in life, you will have an easier time solving it.

2.Signaling danger
A stressful scenario causes your body to release chemicals such as cortisol, norepinephrine, and epinephrine, all of which prepares your body for a fight. Also, these hormones shock the body and force it to react swift in pursuit of safety. That is why,  too much stress can cause heart attack and blood pressure. In the case of short-lived stress, however, the flight and fight response can be a lifesaver. Think of a case where you are on the verge of being hit by a car but due to the sudden stress, your body subconsciously jumps out of harm.

3.Boosts your immune system
They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and they definitely are right. Good or bad stress increases the rate in which your heart pumps blood. Bad stress will lead to heart diseases and high blood pressure. But if you experience small nuggets of stress, the heart gets used to the fluctuations in its pumping rate. Your body also develops a thick skin against high blood pressure. In the long run, the stress fortifies your immune system.

Stress also excites your body’s immune cells and sets them out into your bloodstream in readiness for whichever danger caused the stress. That means an increased immune mechanism, though short-lived.

4. Raises efficiency
If you are working on a 2-hour deadline, for example, you definitely get stressed out because you fear that you won’t deliver. Then just when you are at the peak of your woes, the boss calls to tell you that you need to deliver the best quality and for some reason, you must complete the job within an hour. Because you don’t want to lose your job, you rush through the assignment and at the same manage to deliver an almost perfect result. If you think about it, stress forced you to be twice as efficient as you previously thought you were.

Also in sports- soccer, for example- a team that trails by one goal towards the end of the game tends to attack more and with greater precision than they did for the entire game. That state of urgency and stress forces the players to pull out their A game.

5. Increasing your brainpower
Working under unavoidable, moderate stress increases your focus on the task at hand. That added concentration stimulates your brain’s short-term psychological stressors so you learn more within a shorter period of time. The stressors force your brain to process more information per minute.

As a matter of fact, a mother who experiences mild stress during pregnancy is more likely to give birth to a kid with immense brain power than a mom who was never stressed at ll. Don’t get it twisted, though; too much stress to a pregnant woman can negatively affect the unborn kid.