One in three employees under constant stress

One in three of all salaried employees in Belgium is suffering from symptoms of chronic stress, according to a study carried out by the University of Leuven for the social research institute Hiva.

The study looked at 2,500 workers in 2015 and found that exactly 33% regularly suffered from stress during working hours, some of them every day. The figure from 2010 was 27%. Over the same period, the number of workers who seldom or never felt stressed fell from 33% to 28%.

The rise in stress levels, the study noted, went hand in hand with the fall in the number of jobs reliant on “monotonous, repetitive tasks, such as assembly-line work, and the increased importance of more complex tasks”.

That has an impact on general stress levels, said researcher Sem Vandekerckhove. “The more challenging people’s work, the more stress levels rise, and we see a negative effect on the work-life balance.”

Employers could, he suggested, tackle the problem by giving employees more freedom to organise their own work, especially in complex situations. “More autonomy lowers stress levels,” he said.