Depression caused by job strain is costing employers hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but most interventions only address half of the problem, says Melbourne University associate professor Anthony LaMontagne.

Job strain, which occurs when there is a discrepancy between the demands of a worker’s role and their capacity to get the job done, is a common cause of stress and depression.

On average, one in five Australian workers suffer from job-strain, says LaMontagne, who recently led a study investigating the financial burden on society.

In one year, $730 million (5.8%) of the economic cost of depression was attributable to job strain, and the “vast majority” of employment-related costs were borne by employers.

Work is not “supposed to be tough”

One reason job strain is so common is that the idea work is “supposed to be tough” is a commonly accepted one, LaMontagne says.

“But I don’t actually buy that,” he says. If the demands of a job are matched by control, “or at a minimum, you can derive esteem from doing a good job”, this needn’t be the case.

Another barrier – more so in the past – was widespread acceptance that work making you sick “was just part of the package”, he says.

“Look at the history of occupational health. It wasn’t all that long ago that it was deemed acceptable for miners to get lung disease and insulators to get mesothelioma and it’s still, in some ways, deemed acceptable for construction workers to have horrible accidents.”

Don’t just look at workers, look at your demands

Another problem is that employers who are trying to do the right thing by their workers often fail to consider all of the factors at play.

Prevalent practice is to address the issue by focusing on helping individual workers to better withstand stressors, LaMontagne says. This might involve training that teaches workers how to better cope with stress or manage their time.

“Those all have a role; they’re quite important,” he says. But a key consideration – external stressors – is often neglected.

As well as or instead of building an individual’s capabilities, employers can reduce job strain by altering the demands of the role, or providing the worker with additional resources and support.

“Where you can’t move one thing, you can move other things,” LaMontagne says.

“So an employer might say, ‘What am I to do with young workers? I can’t give them a lot of control – they don’t have experience’, and that’s true, they’re new entrants to the labour market, they don’t have a lot of experience to build on.

“What [employers] can do is make sure that the demands are reasonable for young workers, and that they’re giving them adequate supervisory and co-worker support to protect them from the adverse affects of those stressors of low control,” he says.

In one of his previous studies, LaMontagne encountered a receptionist whose job involved receiving clients, photocopying, organising meetings and a range of other tasks. The reason her job was so stressful was not that she had to juggle multiple tasks, but that her manager insisted she perform each task in a certain order.

Let workers to decide how to get the job done

The good news is that improving control can be as simple as “allowing the employee to be involved in deciding how to get the job done”, LaMontagne says.

“Ways of getting people’s input on how to get the job done vary enormously depending on the context,” he says.

“If you’re in a small business, you’d expect there to be pretty good informal communication, whereas in a larger business you might need some sort of formal mechanism to get people’s input into how to do the job,” such as a regular meeting to solicit suggestions.

“It’s basically practising good management,” LaMontagne says. “It’s making sure that the demands of the job are matched by the resources provided, be those peoples’ decision-making capacity, or materials needed to get the job done, skills [or] experience.

Employers should also consider questions such as:

• how is the job organised?
• are the demands achievable?
• are resources provided to get the job done?
• has the worker been given as much control as they can handle? and
• are they getting appropriate supervisor support?

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