Stress prevents around a million Americans from going to work each day. When you consider that 94% of people feel stressed at work, it’s surprising that number isn’t higher. It also really highlights the importance of reducing stress in the workplace.
Stress comes with too many physical and mental health issues for me to list in this blog post, but some of its more insidious symptoms include joint or muscle aches; shorter tempers; detachment from events/surroundings; and getting ill more frequently.
All these symptoms can impact an employee’s home life and their ability to do their job.
It’s not just employees who feel the impact of work-related stress, though. The global cost of stress, anxiety, and depression amounts to roughly $1 trillion in lost productivity.
So not working towards reducing stress in the workplace can have a huge effect on your business.
How do you prevent your employees from experiencing stress at work? Here are our tips for reducing stress in the workplace:
Don’t treat everyone like an extrovert
It’s been years since Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking debuted. Yet for introverts, it can still sometimes feel like we’re expected to be raring to go and happy to be around people all the time.
Not everyone likes loud, open-plan offices or socializing after work. That doesn’t mean they don’t like their colleagues. It just means they need time to reset so that they can perform at their best.
What one person sees as celebratory drinks with coworkers, another may see as a trap. Whether someone drinks or not, we don’t get a lot of time to ourselves after work. For those of us who need a quiet space, those few hours between work and sleep are crucial.
Yet saying no to those drinks can mean colleagues judge us and even pass us over for promotions. All because we recharge our batteries differently.
And, while we’re at it, someone not talking in a meeting doesn’t mean they’re not engaged. It could simply mean they’re digesting what’s being said. Or they’re uncomfortable around so many people. It doesn’t mean they’re incapable of performing in their role.
Accommodating an array of different communication styles is an important way of reducing stress in the workplace.
Monitor workloads—and adjust accordingly
It’s all too easy for a manageable workload to slowly get bigger and bigger until it becomes unmanageable. And this can happen without employees or managers realizing it until the employee becomes stressed or burned out.
Managers therefore need to keep an eye on their employees’ workloads, ensuring they’re doable within their working hours and they don’t have to sacrifice personal time to hit deadlines. Unsurprisingly, employees’ workloads have a huge impact on how well you succeed at reducing stress in the workplace.
Be realistic with deadlines
While deadlines can be motivating, they can also lead to a lot of stress. It’s all too common for managers to overpromise to clients then push their employees too far and cause them to burn out.
For instance, this is especially common in the gaming industry, with what they call “crunch.”
The closer a game’s release gets, the greater the expectation that employees work longer hours, sacrificing time with their loved ones and possibly even sleep, too.
Someone I know who previously worked in the gaming industry would get home around midnight, then leave around six the following morning. For months. That’s not healthy, normal, or acceptable.
Things in the game industry are changing, slowly. And while the game industry may be bad, it’s not the only industry that pushes its employees to work harder and risk burnout to hit an impossible deadline.
Maintaining reasonable expectations is key to reducing stress in the workplace.
Keep an eye out for discrimination and microaggressions
Any time a business thinks that it’s 100% dealt with discrimination, it’s likely to slip backward.
Preventing discrimination in the workplace requires constant, active effort, in the same way that for a business to grow it requires regular effort. It is work, after all.
Just because you don’t experience discrimination in the workplace, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It could just be that it’s directed toward a different group and you haven’t seen it. Or you don’t know what to look for.
Disabled people experience the most discrimination in the workplace, for example.
People with hidden disabilities may not even share their disabilities with their colleagues for fear of negative reactions.
I’ve been told many times that I’m being a drama queen because I find lights too bright or spaces too noisy, even if sensitivity to those things affects my ability to do my job.
Those types of comments affected how comfortable I felt in the workplace and made me feel judged and less accepted in that space. It was a clear indicator that employer wasn’t as inclusive as it claimed to be.
If you see someone say or do something discriminatory, either call them out on it if you feel comfortable doing so, or if you don’t, speak to HR. When your organization is more inclusive, reducing stress in the workplace becomes easier.
Connect employees
Loneliness can be stressful. And even someone surrounded by people every day can feel lonely if the people they’re with don’t understand them.
Employee groups can help them to connect with colleagues from different departments, or even countries, who have things in common with them. This helps employees feel like they belong at work and can help new employees settle in faster.
But finding an effective way to manage employee groups can be challenging. That’s where we come in.
Using Workrowd, you can manage your employee groups in one, simple place. Employees have everything they need to network with their colleagues. And, you can measure your groups’ effectiveness with regular feedback surveys.
Conclusion
Stress, like many health conditions, can creep up on you. One minute you’re fine, the next you’re crumbling over a never-ending workload.
That’s why it’s so important to always be on the lookout for signs of stress in the workplace, in both you and your colleagues. You can then find ways to work towards reducing stress in the workplace before it escalates.
Are you ready to implement some of these strategies for reducing stress in the workplace? Workrowd can help.
With our all-in-one engagement tool suite, you can easily keep tabs on stress levels in your organization. From automated surveys to groups offering crucial support to stressed employees, everything you need is in one place.
Curious to learn more? Visit us online or email us directly at hello@workrowd.com.
