I talk to a lot of people and most of them are stressed at work and carrying it over to their homes. The question then becomes, “What drives performance—fear or fun?”If someone asks employees what it’s like to work at Google, the most likely answer is that it’s exciting to work in a fun, nontraditional business culture. Conversely, if one asks the same question at a struggling company—where leadership is trying to improve profitability by cutting cost and rightsizing is the mantra—the likely answers would be "I’m just doing my job," "there’s too many things to do," "the culture is adversarial," "there’s internal strife and lack of motivation," or "I’m tired of working hard and being stressed." If a company is growing profitably, employees are happy and doing well irrespective of workload. In a struggling company, with stagnant or declining sales, management cuts cost to sustain profitability. Cutting costs sometimes includes reducing investments in development or training. While a company tries to stay profitable, sales continue to suffer without investments in new products or services, instilling fear in the leadership, which results in scared, stressed employees. This is common at many companies.

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