Neuroticism is one of the Big Five personality traits, characterized by a tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety, fear, and frustration. Individuals with high levels of neuroticism are often more sensitive to stress and more likely to react negatively to challenges.

This trait can significantly impact job performance, mental health, and overall life satisfaction, and can also exacerbate mental disorders, including comorbidity—the co-existence of multiple disorders.

The adverse consequences of neuroticism are usually passed on to public health systems, where the overall economic burden of neuroticism has long surpassed the costs associated with treating common mental disorders.

For sales professionals, the job’s inherent uncertainties—such as long sales cycles, complex negotiations, and reliance on commissions—can create a breeding ground for neurotic tendencies. This is especially true for B2B (business to business) salespeople, whose work differs greatly from the consumer salespeople we all interact with.

A consumer salesperson might, for instance, sell you a car—the process would take a few hours at most, with minimal repercussions if the deal fell through. However, a B2B salesperson would be responsible for selling a large company a fleet of vehicles, or a wholesale shipment of parts to a car manufacturer.

These deals can take a long time to close, and involve large transactions, complex products, multiple stakeholders and unpredictable outcomes. All of this massively increases uncertainty.

B2B sales jobs and neuroticism

Our comprehensive study, which involved around 1,700 B2B salespeople and 24,000 non-sales professionals, found a clear link between B2B sales roles and increased neuroticism. The research shows that the constant uncertainty in B2B sales jobs triggers defensive emotional responses which, when activated frequently, can reinforce and heighten neuroticism over time.

Certain features of B2B sales jobs are at the root of this trend:

• Complex customer needs: B2B salespeople often deal with clients who have multifaceted requirements that need tailored solutions. This can lead to prolonged decision-making processes and uncertain outcomes.

• Long sales cycles: B2B sales cycles can last months, with success dependent on numerous variables, including the decisions of various stakeholders within the client’s organization.

• Negotiation toughness: B2B sales often involve tough negotiations with clients who are experienced in securing the best deals. This can create a high-pressure environment where the salesperson’s success is constantly under threat.

• Variable Compensation: Many sales roles are heavily reliant on commissions, meaning that financial stability is directly tied to performance. This uncertainty can exacerbate stress and anxiety, particularly during periods of low sales.

Mental health and safety: lessons from construction work

The harmful effects of chronic uncertainty in sales work—namely, a change in personality that may lead to mental disorders—should be treated, in essence, like any other workplace hazard.

Just as the construction industry takes steps to protect workers from physical harm, corporate organizations should consider protecting their employees from psychological harm, particularly in high-pressure roles like B2B sales.

While construction workers wear helmets and safety gear, sales professionals need mental and emotional safeguards to mitigate the risks associated with their work.

The first step for both individuals and companies is to acknowledge the risks associated with B2B sales roles. For employers, this means recognizing that these roles can have a significant impact on mental health—similar to how some jobs might carry physical risks—and back this up by offering support to employees. For employees, this means having access to the facts and using them to make informed career choices, as well as taking their own mental health into consideration when accepting new work.

Sales organizations can take proactive steps to support their employees’ mental health. This might include offering mindfulness programs, gym memberships, or access to mental health counseling, as well as making sure employees have time to use these services. Providing paid personal days may also allow employees to take time off when they need a mental health break, promoting a healthier work-life balance and helping prevent an increase in neuroticism.

Managers can also play a crucial role by redesigning sales roles to reduce the factors that contribute to uncertainty and neuroticism. This might involve simplifying sales targets, offering clearer feedback, or providing more stable compensation plans to make salespeople less dependent on commissions.

Regular mental health checkups shosuld also be required. Just as safety inspections are routine (and often required by law) in physically demanding jobs, psychological assessments should be a standard practice in sales organizations. By regularly assessing employees’ levels of neuroticism and other personality traits, companies can identify when intervention is needed.

Finally, offering training programs that equip salespeople with the skills to handle long sales cycles and tough negotiations can serve as both a development tool and a preventive measure against neuroticism. These programs not only enhance job performance, but also provide employees with strategies to manage the stressors that contribute to psychological harm.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

At the end of September, the UK’s last remaining coal power plant, Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, will be retired. The closure of the plant should—and will—be celebrated by environmentalists, as the move away from coal has made Britain’s electricity much cleaner over the past decade. It is on this basis that the UK claims climate leadership.

In the 1950s, coal provided the overwhelming majority of British energy, and as recently as 2012 it still generated 40%. By 2022, it was less than 2%. In a month’s time, it will be zero.

Phasing out coal was a brutal and profound process. Organized labor was decimated, entire regions were forced into decline, and communities were left with sustained economic, social and health problems. The towering ghosts of power stations like Ratcliffe-on-Soar will haunt Britain’s ongoing effort to phase out North Sea oil and gas and replace it with clean energy.

And we are witnessing this haunting in real-time. After the Labor government announced its plans to end new licenses for oil and gas in British waters—necessary to meet the Paris Agreement—workers and trade unions feared history would repeat itself in terms of job losses and blighted communities.

The general secretary of Unite, Sharon Graham, noted that without a more thorough plan, the policy risked creating “the coal miners of our generation.” A recent motion at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) gathering in Brighton called for no ban on oil and gas licensing before a fully funded jobs guarantee is agreed. The motion narrowly passed.

Workers and unions are demanding a “just transition” from polluting industries into the clean industries of the future. But to achieve this, the UK government must learn from what happened with coal.

Many places still rely on oil and gas jobs

Although oil and gas are not as embedded throughout British life as coal once was, there are many settlements and larger areas still dependent on energy jobs. Grangemouth in central Scotland is a good example. In November 2023, the owner, Petroineos, announced plans to close the town’s oil refinery in 2025, bringing a century of production to an end at the cost of 400 jobs.

Even if the UK government did issue new oil and gas licenses, the North Sea faces structural decline. Production peaked around the turn of the century. Since 2014, as many as 200,000 jobs have been lost either offshore or along the supply chain onshore.

From gas to wind?

Planning for the end of fossil fuels is therefore an urgent endeavor. The dominant strategy for protecting skilled jobs is to transition workers into the industries set to replace North Sea production: wind energy and other low-carbon technologies.

However, though Britain has developed a large wind power sector, it remains a major importer of turbines. Domestic manufacturing makes only a small contribution, and developers are not required to use British-made turbines or other parts, despite the jobs this would create.

This has left Grangemouth workers discontented. When one of us (Ewan Gibbs) and Riyoko Shibe interviewed young refinery workers at Grangemouth earlier this year, many commented that there were relatively few jobs in renewables. When jobs were visible on LinkedIn and comparable job sites, one told us that “you’ll see there’s a big difference in terms and conditions.”

In its current form, the UK wind industry will find it hard to provide the types of secure ongoing employment that oil and gas historically has. Most jobs are in the construction and maintenance of wind farms, with the latter threatened by automation. Without public investment and a targeted industrial policy, Britain will remain a net importer of wind technology, and the phasing out of North Sea oil and gas will prove costly in job terms.

More investment needed

Britain’s lack of state intervention is not the norm. After all, more than half of British wind farms are state-owned, though less than 1% are owned by the UK government. Swedish, Norwegian, French, Irish and German state-owned entities are major players, but the biggest is Denmark’s Ørsted, a former oil company turned renewables giant which is mostly state-owned. In the UK’s most recent offshore wind auction, 70% of the projects were awarded to Ørsted.

The newly launched Great British Energy could give the state a foothold in the North Sea once more. This publicly owned company plans to focus on domestic manufacturing and will invest in ports and other infrastructures to “unlock strategic bottlenecks.”

But if such projects are to be meaningfully incorporated into a just transition, they will need to offer continuity and security to oil and gas workers. As one Grangemouth worker put it, referring to his colleagues facing the choice of either remaining unemployed locally or relocating to use their skills:

“They’re moving to the Middle East, they’re moving to the north-east of Scotland. They’re moving offshore, they’re moving to the Shetlands, and therefore it’s not just a transition, in my view, if we’re moving to these jobs.”

Another worker highlighted the risks that Grangemouth could join the coalfields in becoming “stranded” communities:

“We’ve got a community that’s been built round the site, we’ve got skills and we’ve got people that work there, we’ve got the infrastructure there—why should we not have these jobs when the time comes to move to these industries? Why can we not have it at Grangemouth?”

Britain’s push to phase out oil and gas is urgent and necessary, but it cannot follow the same trajectory as Britain’s exit from coal—lessons must be learned. The opportunities presented by the transition away from fossil fuels will only be fully realized if workers are at its center.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.