According to a survey by Statista, “39% of employees agree that work overload is the primary reason for job stress.”
That means more and more employees are subjected to constant work pressure that negatively impacts their lives. Workplace stress can be defined as a negative physical and emotional response to a highly demanding job culture.
Micromanagement, toxic work environment, discrimination, lack of communication, and other personal reasons can induce workplace stress. This can elevate health issues and give rise to anxiety and depression. In addition, these factors can lower workforce productivity levels, morale, and engagement rates.
Therefore, companies must address the issue head-on and take necessary steps to alleviate stress levels and create a healthy work environment.
This blog will highlight the best practices that organizations can adopt to combat workplace stress and enhance employee productivity.
What are the main consequences of stress at work?
When employees are distressed about work, it reflects in the organization’s overall productivity. Some of the ill effects are:
• High rate of absenteeism
• Lack of employee engagement
• Poor relationship between employers and employees
• Low quality work
• Poor reputation in the market as a result of employee word of mouth
• Increasing employee turnover
So how can you prevent stress at work and avoid all those consequences?
Here are some effective ways that organizations can follow to reduce workplace stress.
5 Effective ways to reduce workplace stress
As discussed above, there could be many reasons for an employee to experience stress at their workplace. Below are five essential best practices that managers can adopt to help their employees manage and reduce workplace stress.
1. Set realistic and achievable targets for employees
First and foremost, managers in organizations should set S.M.A.R.T goals that align with their mission. It essentially translates to setting specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based goals. Every employee has unique capabilities and capacities. Therefore, forcing them to work towards a massive goal within a tight deadline will toss away their work-life balance and morale.
Thus, managers should first understand employees’ daily workload and prioritize tasks with a reasonable timeline. This helps release employee stress and increases their enthusiasm for the next goal.
2. Create a healthy work environment for employees
Organizations can strive to create a conducive work environment for their employees. For example, they can offer flexible working hours to balance employees’ work and personal life. A flexible working arrangement is a great way for organizations to improve their work culture and employee productivity. Furthermore, managers can encourage employees to take sufficient breaks and spend quality time with their friends and family. Quality pieces of furniture can also feel and look great for employers, but they can be pricy sometimes. If you want to equip your office with top-of-the-line furniture but require some extra cash you do not have on hand right now, head over to PaydayPot.
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This way, employees will be able to release work stress from time to time and come back rejuvenated. In addition, managers can strive to have an open communication channel where employees can freely and honestly express themselves. This will reduce any additional mental stress they may be dealing with for a long time.
3. Formulate staff recognition programs
One of the basic human needs is to feel appreciated and recognized. Every employee spends a large chunk of their time working for a company to the best of their ability. Therefore, the organization must recognize and reward them in formal and informal ways. Having a one-on-one meeting to appreciate them, sending some goodies for extra work, and appreciating them during meetings are good examples of informal recognition.
Every organization can have a formal system where managers can track an employee’s growth and contribution. They can then award them with certificates and rewards during bi-annual and annual events. This makes employees feel their work is valued in the company. Furthermore, it reduces stress levels and increases workforce morale.
4. Organize team building activities at regular intervals
Managers can regularly organize team-building activities to relieve employees’ stress. They can host picnics, get-together sessions, games, yoga sessions, team lunch, etc. These activities can help employees build healthy relationships with their peers and employers.
Moreover, it enhances their mood and helps them shrug off workplace tension and internal conflicts. Team building activities help develop resilience, manage anger and move on from disappointments. Employees can benefit hugely from these activities to reduce stress levels and improve mental health.
5. Provide professional help to deal with stress
An employee can experience stress for several reasons, and their job may not be one of them. In either case, it affects their performance and lowers productivity. Therefore, managers can take the initiative to promote mental health campaigns in the organizations.
They can also tie-up with mental health counselors and institutions to provide affordable mental health services such as counseling and therapy sessions for their employees. All of this will ensure that employees can deal with stress in a healthy manner and stay more productive at work.
Now let’s understand the role of resource management solutions in reducing workplace stress.
How can resource management software help reduce workplace stress?
Saviom’s resource management software offers 360-degree visibility of the enterprise resources. This helps managers assign resources to various activities based on their capacity, availability, skills, and experience. Moreover, it eliminates allocating any less experienced resource to a critical task or highly skilled resource to any low-priority work.
With the tool, managers can track utilization rates of resources and check if resources are optimally utilized across the enterprise. Furthermore, managers can implement different optimization techniques such as resource leveling and smoothing if any resource is overwhelmed with the workload. These methods help to ease the workload of employees and improve their performance.
Thus, in this way, modern resource management tool can help alleviate workplace stress.
Conclusion
Today, most organizations face employee stress issues on a very large scale. Therefore, the onus lies on managers to keep a check on their workforce schedule and find ways to eliminate distress.
However, the best practices mentioned above, when paired up with an advanced resource management tool, can help companies to optimize the stress level of their employees. This will further help in improving their performance and engagement levels.
So, how do you manage workplace stress?