All that stress

So what are the outcomes from keeping an individual operating close to or beyond their optimal stress?

What you get is a decrease in human performance, thats is decision making capabilities are reduced, physical capabilities are reduced and the body fatigues. What this means for an outdoor professional is that it makes their life more difficult.

A fatigued person in the outdoors is going to be more susceptible to injury. I’ve had a quick scan round the literature and there is no studies that have looked at injuries for outdoor professionals and when they happen. However generally from occupational studies it shows that a number of injuries are caused from fatigue, the link between fatigue and driving accidents has been highly publicised. This should be a serious concern to outdoor professionals as they quite often drive back from remote areas after a week or longer in the field sometimes with a bus load of passengers. However it may not be as serious as a motor vehicle accident more the risk of a musculoskeletal injury from loading a canoe on a trailer or roof racks. This combined with dehydration and nutritional deficiencies from operating in the field and the body is again susceptible to injury and disease.

Impairment of decision making abilities from cumulative stress is a major consideration in outdoor work. Outdoor professionals are involved in making a decisions constantly often beyond the departure of participants. This combined with programming design that sees programs build up towards a climax increases the stress applied to the guide. If the program involves a pre dawn start on the final day, the body is already operating out of regular operating limits as dictated by its circadian rhythm. If an incident was to occur the mental capacities of a guide who has been operating for weeks on end with limited rest time would be far lower than their optimum.

Reading the work of Glyn Thomas from La Trobe Uni, this is also a cause of burnout amongst outdoor staff in Australia and would be the case for operations across the world. If your mental capabilities are already stressed returning to the non-outdoor world may not be the easiest thing with those stressors building on the ones that have just been left behind in the bush, eg relationships, company management and finances.

Some strategies are to have strategic human resources planning that recognizes the needs of peak times and employees are not overworked and get rest time between field time. By having this rest time between programs the out of field world doesn’t build up as a stressor eg not having gone to the bank to make a payment, seeing your partner, eating nutritional food. Have people there to assist in administration of the process, eg field staff should not be dealing with cleaning clients gear. The field staff are the people you are paying to keep the client alive in the outdoors, skills worth far more than than the cost incurred by having them wash a tent which almost anyone could do. Treat the guide as a person of skill, limit the amount of non-skilled labouring that they are required to do, this is just building on their fatigue. This is often an idea that outdoor companies struggle with especially if their staff earn less than what it costs for a casual cleaner. However the cost of retraining an outdoor professional that is replacing a trained person that has burnt out is far more expensive than paying that casual who comes in Friday evenings and cleans gear. At the end of the day that experience you lose is worth far more in risk management and client satisfaction especially when it comes to managing an emergency.

Therefore an understanding in management is probably the biggest factor in reducing stress buildup, by knowing the stressors and the effect that they bring and having an understanding then management can assess its employees for these effects. They can then work with it, eg take people off the roster, put employees on less intensive options, plan for the stress. If management treats these people as commodities as many organisations in the business world do then if they are lucky the employee will just leave, if they are unlucky they may kill someone.

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