Expert delivery on Organisational Psychology and Health at the Education Supper
STRESS comes when the pressure exceeds our individual ability to cope with it....
Our annual supper, which has been brought forward to the Spring, took place on 1st April in the Skinners Hall. A balmy evening enabled the 60 members and guests present to enjoy a glass of champagne in the open before moving indoors to listen to Professor Cary Cooper, the Distinguished Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health. As it happened, our dinner coincided with the national launch of a campaign on this very subject that is being supported by such employers as Procter and Gamble, American Express, British Telecom and Santander. As Cary explained, the OECD estimates we lose £70bn each year in the UK alone to areas such as stress; it's costing employers £26bn and at least a third of that is probably avoidable. Professor Cooper was in London to help launch this campaign, to talk to us and to participate in a House of Commons Committee which is taking evidence on the matter so we felt we were at the core of an important initiative that will be of great interest to our clients.
In his address, Professor Cooper explained that stress comes when the pressures we are all under exceed our individual ability to cope with them. He suggested that the Anglo-Saxon culture encouraged long working hours to the detriment of the quality of what resulted; that people rarely get the recognition and encouragement that they need to feel and that measuring our success by such macro-economic indicators as GDP is leading to ever greater divergence between sensible policy decisions and what happens in practice. He ended on a high note with a quotation taken from an election address by Bobby Kennedy.
Earlier in the evening, Past Master Geoff Llewellyn had the opportunity to announce the successful culmination of many months of effort with the creation of the Cass Business School Jon Moulton Scholarship. The first award has now been made and is reported elsewhere.
David Peregrine-Jones
Second Warden