Primary Stress Intervention

There are two fairly commonly used methods of dealing with occupational stress and they are tertiary level stress interventions which consists of Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) and secondary level stress intervention which consists of stress management programs. According to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Employee Assistance Programs are “voluntary, work-based programs that offer free and confidential assessments, short-term counseling, referrals, and follow-up services to employees who have personal and/or work-related problems.” Stress management programs can occasionally overlap with EAPs but still reside in two different categories because stress management programs are different in that they generally involve teaching employees …show more content…
that the employee works for. The use of primary stress intervention will have an impact on the work culture, specifically one in which the employee feels as though they are empowered. Studies that have shown that this has a positive impact on employee participation, productivity, and quality control support this assertion (Cooper). Changes in organizational culture can also help foster particular values, attitudes, and work ethics the organization would like the employees to possess. Primary Stress Intervention addresses stressors individually and works to eliminate them, thus being both a proactive and preventative measure against potential and existing causes of occupational stress. Such methods are perfectly feasible as well, because there are many examples of these methods being used separately in the workplace today. For example, job dissatisfaction and stress due to feeling that there is no way to advance in a company can be individually rectified through regular appraisals, the provision of retraining opportunities, career sabbaticals, and counseling. The identification of that problem and the providing of a specific solution to eliminate the cause is what primary stress intervention is. The time, money, and effort required to examine such issues and attempt to remedy them on a case by case basis would be paid for by the entity the employee was working for but the amount …show more content…
measuring the effectiveness of such methods can prove to be difficult as they often do not provide much quantitative data with which to measure and the qualitative data often comes from employees describing the effectiveness of the programs. This can be a problem because since the programs are voluntary, people who believe such methods would help them better deal with their occupational stress tend to be people who have found such methods effective in the past, resulting in skewed and biased study results. Furthermore, the effectiveness of such programs has only been demonstrated in the short term while Primary Stress Intervention methods have proven to be effective in the long term (Cooper). Tertiary Stress Intervention methods provide employees with means to cope with stressors in a manner that suggests all employees are able to cope with stress in the same way or the stress is being caused by the same stressor. None of this is to say that secondary and tertiary levels of intervention do not have some useful role to play, as they have proven to be effective on particular groups of individuals before. Furthermore, there is no evidence to suggest that primary, secondary, and tertiary stress prevention methods cannot be used in conjunction with one another and, in fact, it is a safe