Cardiac arrest before one reaches 30? Severe diabetes? Shooting blood pressure? Regular low-back pains? Chronic ulcers? The cause of these and many other ailments plaguing today's corporate executives is stress.

Says Sanjay Salooja, CEO of Delhi-based Empower, a company that holds programmes to combat stress in the corporate sector: "Stress is one of the major causes of decreasing employee productivity. An increasing number of executives are unable to cope with workplace pressures. And their personal life, as a result, suffers too."

He reels off statistics to prove his point: for every 100 work hours, employers pay an average of 2.78 hours of absences per employee; psychological problems account for 61 per cent of absences from work each year as well as over 65 per cent of employee terminations; two out of every three employee in India is a victim of stress.

Corporate trainers or stress-busters are using innovative methods to help executives in overcoming stress. These range from yoga to meditation to counselling to even jazz music (as was done to a group of Bose Corporation employees last year). Most of these exercises are done in workshops spread across a few days.

Says Art of Living practitioner and corporate stress-buster Tathagata Roy, "Long hours, work-life imbalances, high expectations and competitiveness are some of the reasons that lead to stress. Actually it is the human mind, and not any external condition, that is the cause of stress. We try to tell people to 'respond' to stress not to 'react' to it."

Delhi-based corporate trainer Shilpi Mohan says that during workshops she tries to bring to the surface the underlying factors behind stress. "I prefer to call my workshops self-management programmes instead of stress-busting ones. The point is to understand the causes, reflect on them and then devise means to overcome them."

Yoga and meditation play an important role in these workshops.  "Breathing exercises such as Sudarshan kriyaand otherpranayams help in controlling the mind. What these workshops do is make the mind more aware," says Roy.

Among other exercises that are common in these workshops are role playing, theatre, games and various group work. "What I'm trying to do is have an experiential-based learning programme. Role playing and other games help in bringing out the unconscious and becoming aware of it," says Mohan.

Salooja of Empower has focused on counselling. "We've counselling sessions on relationships, parenting, handling pressure among others," he says.

Besides face-to-face counselling he also offers telephonic or web-based ones. At the moment he has counsellors manning telephones for 12 hours a day, which he hopes will soon become a 24X7 operation.

Course fees for these workshops vary. While Art of Living workshops range from Rs 5,000-Rs 12,000 (depending upon the management cadre), Salooja charges Rs 1,000 per employee. Mohan's fees are around Rs 20,000 a day for a group of around 10 persons. Nearly all stress-busters agree that more and more corporates are becoming aware of the need to cope with stress.

Most B-schools have a course in stress management for their human resource management students.  Regular workshops for employees, claim stress-busters, reduce errors, employee friction and absenteeism while increasing employee commitment, company morale, customer satisfaction and productivity.

Contact address:

• Sanjay Salooja: sanjay@empoweronline.net;
• Shilpi Mohan: shilpi123mohan@yahoo.com;
• Tathagata Roy: tathagat@now-india.net