Redesign the Job

Many people would consider their jobs so stressful these days. Like in the US alone, about 40% of workers described their jobs are very stressful. In the UK, where the most stressful work were nursing and teaching occupation, with 2% of workers at any one time suffering for work related stress or sometimes anxiety and depression. This also increases by 4% in the teaching profession which affects physical condition that brought about by stress.

These figures only shows how stress during work has become a major problem and this does not affect the physical condition of the person but also for the companies, performance of their employees to provide quality result is also affected. Companies must also be aware of the result of these stress related impact to the business, like cost, this is brought out by both lack of good performance by the staff in their work due to stress and sometimes the number of days being at work may also be replaced by staffs being at home or in worst cases at the hospital.These negative outcomes of stress must be addressed by the company. This may start from fin ding the main cause of stress by the staffs and how to formulate a better job for them like redesigning it, in order to minimize or eliminate stress in their work. (Stress Management, n. d.

). In the current work environment, there are ten identified most stressful jobs in the world. IT jobs are on top of the list, followed by medicines and caring jobs, engineering, sales and marketing, education, finance, human resource management, operations, production and clerical work.In each of these professions there is also ten specific work stress that was identified that keeping employees feeling stress in their respective jobs and these are: (1) workload assignment, (2) feeling undervalued, (3) meeting the deadlines, (4) type of work people have to do, (5) having to take on other people’s work, (6) lack of job satisfaction, (7) lack of control over the required working days, (8) having to work long hours, (9) frustrated with the working environment, and lastly (10) meeting targets.

It is true that the main problem with the industry now, is that they would always look into the external factor of the business and neglecting the need of the internal organization. This does not provide any good for the company, because internal groups are still the one providing the service and producing the products for the customers and also for the management. This must be changed or be co-prioritized in order to eliminate problems in the organization and be able to address stress related problems by the employees.There are also factors that were identified that contributed to the causes listed above, and these are: (1) Seeing others in the company not performing their duty well, and that makes jobs of others increasingly difficult; (2) managers these days continuously changing decisions also affects the performance of staffs; (3) Lack of support from managers, and even for worst times, being neglected; (4) Pressure that is given by managers, like difficulties of projects with no enough preparation and study on it; (5) Feeling put-upon by managers, meaning they were managers being too personal about them and with that giving them difficult projects;(6) Interruption by colleagues, this means that there are other staffs that are interrupting the flow of the job, like excessive asking for assistance; (7) Interruption by managers, too much is being asked and clarified, even the project is already on-going, which also affects the flow of work and eventually not meeting deadlines; (8) Bullying behavior of managers, being so dominant and overuse of powers over the staff; (9) lack of support from colleague, where everybody are just following direction and nobody is arguing the wrong approach done by the management; and lastly (10) Bullying behavior of colleagues, where there are also other staffs that overpowers some staff and giving them extra loads which is sometimes not anymore assigned to them.

(The Top 10 Stressful Jobs, n. d. ).Since IT job was considered the most stressful job in the world, in this paper it will provide an example on how an IT related job can be redesign in order to eliminate or manage stress. The job that will be used is a Software Developer of a company.A Software Developer or most commonly known as Programmer is one of the most stressful jobs in Information Technology (IT) industry.

Typically a system before it can be developed; there are stages that need to be followed. The Software development life cycle is the main guide of the development team, which includes the programmer or system developer. In this cycle, the following are the different stages:(1) Requirement gathering, where the system development lead and with the Project manager will conduct study and getting of all requirements for the system to be developed, it includes finding report structure, business process, etc. which will be sufficient and needed in the development of the system.

2) Then Systems Analysis, then the system lead, will then be analyzing the real need of the customer, by further look into the requirements taken in the previous phase; (3) Systems Design, the stage where System Development lead will developed a business requirements and functional specification for the developers to be used.(4) Actual Construction of the system, with the basis of technical design presented by the technical lead, the actual development of the system will be done by developers. (5) Testing phase, where developers will also be part of it, this is where developers do unit testing first of their assigned module, then it will be transfer to inte4gration testing, after that is QA testing and then User Acceptance Testing or UAT. 6) Deployment of the system to the customer, and lastly is (7) maintenance Agreement and Training.For the developer, the stress started when the development requirements are changing due to customer demands and lack of clarification made by technical leads and project managers. And once the requirements are changing there are tough deadlines and studying of new requirements may affect other existing module assignment which timeline would not change.

These results to overlapping of assignment and developers may start to be required to be in the office for long hours and even extending their work days in a week and that affects their personal life.With the changes in the requirements, it is also a big problem with developers working with other teams as well like for the QA team handling the QA test as per their own schedule will also be affected, more and more groups will be finding their time in the schedule of the developers and with these more stressful management of time in finishing the job will be experienced. These are also the main reason why in the IT industry these days or IT department in most companies where mass-turnover of employees is happening. The lack of focus of managers in identifying velar requirements and the ineffectiveness in allocating time and schedule resulted to stress at work.That is why for most efficient managers, they would allocated buffer in their timelines and schedules which will be helpful for developers, if there is sudden change in the development projects.

The lack of experience with managers in the design of the system is also another cause of the problem, because designs are very important because it includes all intricacies of the project. And if there are aspects in the systems that are uncovered, that will also be contributing to the delay of the project as well as changes in the customer requirement. On the next part of this paper will be the presentation of the current stressful work status of a developer, and then it will follow by the suggested plan on how stress can be eliminated, which improved productivity, commitment and satisfaction towards can work.