Nowadays many people work longer time and got more stressful jobs than ever before. What causes this? How can employers make the worker's lives easier?

Life today is filled with sources of stress, working longer time is one of which and cannot be avoided. The objective of this essay is to outline both the causes and appropriate ways of dealing with it.

As the unemployment rate is climbing, people feel more pressure to survive under intense competition and they find it difficult to keep their jobs without working hard. It will become worse especially for young people who just graduated from university, because they don’t have any real life experiences and can be dismissed easily. So people have to put more efforts on their work and some will work in unsocial hours.

Another reason for this phenomenon is that technological advances make it possible for people to work long hours even while off duty. They have to answer phones and check emails after they leave work, and for this reason, their working hours are prolonged. This is particularly the case for those who are working in the service sector and have to be on call long hours.

There are several practices for employers to help tackle this problem. One is to provide employees with more staff training so they can have a good grasp of technology. If employee can acquire more knowledge and improve their skills, they can work with higher efficiency and reduce their working time. Another approach is to provide some stress management trainings for employees. This can help them achieve work-life balance, and do more activities for pleasure. By this way employees can cope with pressure from work better.

As suggested above, competition and technology can be taken as the source of long hours working. Employees have responsibility to provide staff training and stress management training as it will benefit both employers and employees to gain optimized working efficiency and productivity.