Stress at work: Pink slips giving employees the blues

NEW DELHI: A senior executive at a leading IT services company recently approached Sairee Chahal, founder of women career services portal SHEROES, to explore job options. The executive was worried there could be bad news for her at work.

A patient of Samir Parikh at the department of mental health and behavioural sciences at Fortis Healthcare in New Delhi lost his job about two months ago. Along with the job, the patient lost complete self-confidence to face interviews. He used to get panic attacks and palpitations hours before an interview.

"He must have skipped about 10 such interview calls due to panic attack before coming for treatment," Parikh said.

Workplace anxiety has sent more employees scurrying to emotional wellness experts, career coaches and clinical psychologists in the past three months than before.

Employee wellness companies and clinical psychologists are reporting extreme stress, insomnia and panic among employees as the appraisal and layoff season takes a toll.

While most such cases are in IT services, the spread of anxiety is across levels of seniority and sectors, depending on how a company is performing.

"There is a lot of stress and anxiety currently among the employees we have conversations with, and employees who are in jobs are actively looking for options in the last six months," said Chahal.

Online emotional wellness startup Your-DOST now gets about 650 calls a day — up from 500 two months ago — on work-related issues. An analysis of these calls shows that those who have been laid off often fear facing stigma and shame, and choose not to share their concerns with friends or family, making their support system limited.

A 20-something woman in Bengaluru approached the startup for counselling. She was laid off a month ago but maintained a 9am-7pm routine because she could not bear to tell her parents that she’d lost her job.

"According to a review of over 4,000 research papers conducted by the University of East Anglia and the What Works Center for Wellbeing, employees who lose their jobs never recover to their earlier level of mental health, self-esteem and satisfaction," said YourDOST co-founder Puneet Manuja. The enormity of the situation prompted YourDOST to launch a three-day helpline on Thursday (June 29-July 1) to help employees cope with career and stress-related issues.

The increased anxiety levels are also due to the fact that layoffs in the IT sector do not seem to be a one-off phenomenon.

"As newer technologies like artificial intelligence, robotic process automation and machine learning become pervasive, many of the processes and jobs will become automated and this'll continue to impact the layoff situation," said Rajeev Banduni, co-founder of GrowthEnabler.

According to Sriram Vaidhyanathan, chief human resource officer of BankBazaar: "This year, the layoff numbers are on a higher side, especially within the IT sector. Replacement hiring will either cease or slow down in the IT sector, thus helping companies to reduce the headcount by 10-15% on a yearly basis."

Companies in India are hardly equipped to handle layoffs, reskilling and related employee issues. Of more than a hundred layoff-related issues YourDOST handled in the past one month, none got professional support from their ex-employers in terms of emotional or career guidance.

"A more striking pattern we found was the lack of transparency, making it uncomfortable for a lot of survivors of the layoffs. A lot of employers did not openly express the reason for layoffs and spent very little time addressing the questions of the people who were laid off or who survived," Manuja said.

Since companies are not transparent, employees read too much into workplace decisions even when not needed, resulting in enormous stress, said Chahal.

On the other hand, even those handing out the bad news to employees are finding it equally difficult. Parikh had one HR head seeking counselling on handing out pink slips at his organisation.