As people become more stressed, the new and the different triggers fear. Millions of dollars are wasted on organizational change efforts that end up being sabotaged and on program implementation delays caused by this innate resistance to change and novelty triggered by stress. Although the tangible costs of employee stress are staggering, it is probably the less definable costs which are most serious. Perhaps the biggest and most unrecognized loss of all is the sense of not having the time to do it right. But the price is still there.
Stress costs organizations dearly in terms of decreased quality and productivity.
The major price a company pays for stress in the workplace, along with the human price, is that their ability to make process improvements nearly always stops. With overwhelming workloads, you have people going so fast, they don't have the time to make the process better. It creates a terrible cycle of trying to work harder and harder because the volume you have to put out is increasing, but you aren't doing anything to make the process more effective and efficient. In his book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr. Covey describes a woodsman feverishly trying to saw down a tree. When asked how long he had been working, he tells the onlooker that it's been about five hours.