Direct cost of work conflict stressors
- Colin Swindells
- Oct 24, 2024
- 2 min read
This article estimates cost per week of workplace conflict for a San Francisco Bay Area engineer based on direct, short term physiological stressors. These are lower bound estimates that do not account for lost revenue, impacts on others, long term compound effects, etc. It’s meant to provide a reference for tech professionals to perform return on investment arguments for coaching, therapy, training and other interventions to improve their wellbeing. #techstress, #workplaceconflict, #mentalhealth, #productivityloss, #emotionalintelligence, #stressmanagement, #bayarea, #techindustry, #worklifebalance, #coaching
The average US worker experiences about 2.8 hours of workplace conflict per week [1]. This contrasts with a low of 1.2 hours per week in Belgium and a high of 3.3 hours per week in Germany. At a macro level, this amounts to $359 billion paid worker hours focused directly on conflict instead of positive productivity. How might a typical engineer, designer, product manager or other tech worker estimate the financial impact on an individual level with the goal of helping return on investment decisions for positive professional interventions including coaching, therapy and training?
Figure 1 is a case study of a San Francisco based Full Stack Engineer. Using the lower 25% and upper 25% quartile compensations from last week’s post [3], we get estimates of $89 / hour and $161 / hour, respectively. We use a conservative aggregate value of 1 hour physiological stress recovery time for every hour of workplace conflict based on recent scientific studies – specifically, a combination of state anxiety recoveries of about 20 minutes and cortisol stress hormone recoveries of about 80 - 120 minutes [2]. Even this focus on direct, short-term, physiological stress responses results in $498 and $899 per week per employee for our engineer use case. If conflicts for our San Francisco based engineers were at typical German workplace levels, direct costs would be $1059 / week. Conversely, the low rates of the typical Belgium workplace levels could serve as a realistic initial goal for US workplace conflict reductions. For example, an upper 25% full stack engineer based in San Francisco would typically save $514 per week in direct wage benefits simply by reducing work conflict levels from the USA average of 2.8 hours / week to the Belgium average of 1.2 hours / week.
Positive impacts are likely much higher than this direct, short-term use case shown in Figure 1. Lost revenue, impacts on others, long-term compound effects, wellbeing value and other costs of workplace conflict all likely add significant amounts to these estimates. Hopefully, this use case can help motivate the value of investing in professional development.
Figure 1: Direct cost estimates per week of workplace conflict for a full stack engineer
[1] Global CP. Workplace conflict and how businesses can harness it to thrive. 2008. https://img.en25.com/Web/CPP/Conflict_report.pdf
[2] Birkett MA. The Trier Social Stress Test protocol for inducing psychological stress. Journal of visualized experiments: JoVE. 2011(56).
[3] Swindells C. Tech compensation and revenue per employee across four cities. https://www.colinswindells.com/post/tech-compensation-and-revenue-per-employee-across-four-cities
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