Over half of business owners stressed-survey

Over half of business owners stressed-survey | Tuesday March 23, 2010 00:00

The Grant Thornton International Business Report (IBR) 2010, which covers the opinions of over 7,400 business owners across 36 economies, puts the stress level for Botswana at 58 percent against a global average of 56 percent.

However, Botswana's stress level has actually gone down by 12 percentage points from previous years.Cash-flow problems and a gloomy economic climate have been stated as the major contributing factors for stress among Botswana businesses. Comments Managing Jay Ramesh, Partner of Grant Thornton in Botswana: 'The robust banking sector, the willingness of Government to continue with development expenditure and the generally stable performance of the non-mining sector kept the stress levels under reasonable control. Topping the league of the most stressed leaders is Mainland China where 76 percent of business owners say their stress levels have increased over the last year.' Other economies that featured high in the stress league table are Mexico (74 percent), Turkey (72 percent), Vietnam (72 percent) and Greece (68 percent).

At the opposite end of the scale are Sweden (23 percent), Denmark (25 percent), Finland (33 percent) and Australia (35 percent) where stress levels are the lowest in the world. The survey also shows that there appears to be a link between stress levels and GDP. Business owners in Mainland China, Vietnam, Mexico, India and Turkey all feature high on the stress league table and are working in environments where high growth is expected. But high stress levels are not peculiar to countries where high growth is expected; at the opposite end of the growth scale, Ireland, Spain and Greece all feature high on the league table. 'We have businesses at both ends of the GDP growth scale experiencing high stress for very different reasons,' says Alex MacBeath of global leader - markets at Grant Thornton International.

'In Mainland China, the pressure is on to keep up with the pace of expansion while in Ireland, for example, the economy is retracting and business owners are worried about how they will keep their business alive.' Business owners were asked about the major causes of workplace stress. Not surprisingly, the most common cause during 2009 was the economic climate with 38 percent of respondents globally citing this as one of their major causes of stress. This was followed by pressure on cash flow (26 percent), competitor activities (21 percent) and heavy workload (19 percent).

MacBeath comments: 'The causes of workplace stress can be categorised into three distinct groups - economic, business and personal. Business owners feel pressures from all sides, so while an employee may place more importance on personal elements such as their work/life balance, the business owner has additional pressures to consider.' The survey also found a correlation between stress levels and the number of days off taken by an individual in a year. Countries at the top of the stress league are those where business owners, on average, take fewer holidays each year.