Название: The Stress Equation: Reduce Burnout, Increase Happiness and Productivity
Автор: Marcus Lagré
Издательство: Pragmatic Bookshelf
Год: August 2024 (P1.0)
Страниц: 156
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf, epub, mobi
Размер: 10.1 MB

Workplace stress is not the weakness of individuals; it's caused by systemic problems. Armed with the insights in this book, you can identify, analyze, and systematically reduce the factors that lead to poor health, low productivity, and personal burnout. This book gives you a framework for understanding stress, and a vocabulary to make it easier to discuss it among colleagues. Stress can be fixed; find out how.

The interviewer asks, "How well do you cope with stress?" Your response should be, "Let's fix your environment so we don't have to."

Work-related stress is one of the leading causes of mental illness among white-collar workers. It hurts companies, projects, and (most importantly) people! Stress is a burden that's created when teams stop working well. The Stress Equation is a model and a tool to help talk about stress as a systemic issue. By exploring how pressure, complexity, and security interact in software teams, we move focus away from the individual, so that we can talk about stress from a team and organizational perspective. By exploring external factors, we discuss how to solve problems rather than cope with the consequences. Whether you're an individual feeling stressed or a manager who can help, you'll learn the causes of, fixes for, and how to talk about stress. We regulate pressure by how we decide how much work we have to do and when it needs to be finished. Complexity is decided by how we handle our product and organization design. Our security is less about our pay and benefits, and more about the support and trust we feel.

Stress should not be a given. Instead, it's a symptom of a diseased organization. With this book, you can begin the healing process.

Who Is This Book For?
While stress is a widespread problem, and pretty much everyone is affected by it at one point or another during their career, I would like to say that this book is for all the people working in software! However, that’s not the type of categorization that marketing departments like to run with. This is completely understandable since it makes their job nearly impossible. Sooo...

The book is aimed at team leads, Scrum Masters, managers, and other leadership roles. Since it’s meant as a tool for continuous improvement, it’s important that management is onboard and willing to commit. Otherwise, improvement is likely to stagnate, never spreading beyond limited portions of an organization. You’ll learn that the overall organizational complexity, something that is typically outside a single team’s or department’s sphere of influence, contributes to creating stressful situations. Changing these situations requires leadership commitment and alignment on a higher level. With that said, if you feel you are suffering from stress but are not in a managerial position, maybe this book can give some insights into why you are feeling stressed and help you find ways to address it by promoting positive change.

Though the concepts are applicable in many organizations, the examples provided are primarily targeted at software companies since that’s where my experience lies. If someone outside of software reads this book and finds it useful, don’t hesitate to get in touch. I would love to hear your take on it! I am pretty easy to find on LinkedIn. Given that I have a background as a Scrum Master and Agile Coach, the book is written from that perspective. I will assume the reader has some familiarity with Agile lingo, but I doubt you need to be an expert to absorb the concepts I’ll try to convey.

About the Author:
Marcus Lagre is a software organization consultant with Snowdrop AB. He's a former programmer and Scrum Master turned enterprise coach in agile transformations, with 20 years of experience in software development. Working with companies ranging from small startups to multinational corporations, he knows what works and what doesn't when scaling agile practices. He has a unique perspective on how stress is created on an organizational level in teams and software product companies.

"The Stress Equation is a thought-provoking and valuable read for anyone working in a fast-changing and complex environment. While software development is at its core, the generic principles and systems thinking approach are applicable far beyond. Recommended reading for individual contributors and leaders who aim for long-term high performance and well-being at once." - Rasmus Lind, Founder & CEO, Learning Leaders Sweden AB