90% of employees report feeling stressed at work. Which means there are a lot of supervisors out there struggling with managing stressed out employees.
If so much of the working population feels stressed, what impact is that having on not just their work, but their personal lives and their relationships with their colleagues?
The more your employees feel stressed, and the longer they feel stressed for, the greater the ripple effect within your business.
When your employees are stressed, it doesn’t just dampen their ability to work. Their stress can influence the rest of the team, bringing the mood and productivity down.
So what are some strategies for managing stressed out employees?
What are the consequences of not managing stressed out employees?
When you fail to take a strategic approach to managing stressed out employees, it can affect their:
- Mood
- Mental health
- Physical health
- Personal relationships
- Work relationships
- Ability to think or focus
- Attention to detail
- Idea generation
This can then lead to your stressed employees bringing their colleagues’ moods down with them. As a result, you get a declining company culture, employees quiet quitting, and an unwelcoming atmosphere for new hires.
Over time, this increases churn rates, reduces tenure, and brings your rating down on sites like Glassdoor.
So then, you don’t attract as many high-quality candidates, further impacting your brand and your profits. All because you didn’t take steps to help your supervisors with managing stressed out employees.
Tips for managing stressed out employees
Now that you know why it’s so important to support your stressed team members, here are some best practices for managing stressed out employees:
Know the early warning signs
If you can spot the early warning signs, and take steps to mitigate the damage, it can go a long way towards preventing employee stress from having a negative impact on individuals, their teams, and your business.
Have honest conversations
If you know an employee is stressed, you need to have an honest conversation with them. Find out why they feel the way they do and what both they, and you, can do before it spirals.
Solutions could involve rebalancing their workload, bringing more people into a project, changing what they’re working on, or even looking at how management handles things. When it comes to managing stressed out employees, it may come out that the problem isn’t the employee, but their leader(s).
After all, over half of employees leave a role because of a bad boss.
Find the cause
What’s really causing your employees to feel stressed?
When you have an honest conversation, you need to get to the root of what’s going on. If you don’t know the cause, you can’t solve it. The most you’ll be doing is putting a Band Aid over the top.
And as soon as things get even worse, that “solution” to managing stressed out employees is going to be as useful as a cheap Band Aid in the shower. It’ll fall off and make the wound sore all over again.
Not only that, but if you don’t treat the cause of the problem, it becomes like an infected wound. It will fester within that employee’s psyche and attitude towards work. Eventually, it will infect your other employees and their attitudes, too.
Offer community support
Sometimes, all we need to feel better is to express our pent-up emotions. This prevents them from having a hold on us.
That’s also why deep friendships are so important—they give us a healthy outlet to talk out what holds us back. There really is truth in a problem shared is a problem halved.
Employee groups are a powerful way to connect your employees. They enable them to meet like-minded colleagues who share their experiences. Oftentimes, they can also offer more understanding than family or friends. Because let’s face it, our family and friends often don’t get what we do unless they work in the same industry (just me?).
They may also be able to offer coping mechanisms to help with managing stressed out employees. Or at the very least lend a sympathetic ear.
Want more from your employee groups?
Workrowd can help you organize your employee initiatives so that you, and your team members, get more from them.
You can keep everything in one place so that employees always have the latest information on hand and don’t have to go searching for it. Get in touch today to find out more.
Offer flexible working
Flexible working is an essential tool when it comes to managing stressed out employees. It’s particularly useful if someone has health conditions or family commitments that make arriving at their desk for 9am every day challenging.
Allowing them to start work at a different time can make some of these other challenges a bit less taxing. It will help them come to work in a better mood and more able to take on the day.
Flexible working also means people can work during the hours that suit them. When employees can do that, you’ll get more from them. Even if it means someone has a breakthrough at 11pm when all their colleagues are asleep.
Not everyone fits into the traditional 9-5 mold. By forcing them into it, all it does is decrease workplace productivity and creativity because they’re working at times when they’re not at their best.
Send a survey
Employee feedback surveys are crucial for measuring employee sentiment.
They can act as canaries in the coal mine, signaling that stress levels are increasing. That way you can intervene to work on better managing stressed out employees before they negatively impact productivity or profits.
Using Workrowd, you can send automated feedback surveys to employees at set milestones. That means there’s no reason not to send them and measure what’s really going on across your team. You can prevent challenges and stressful times from escalating into something that’s detrimental to your team and your business.
Conclusion
Employee stress doesn’t have to be inevitable. So much of it relies on your company culture and managing expectations, from clients, leadership, and employees.
Providing adequate support is also an important part of managing stressed out employees. Employee groups enable you to empower your employees to support each other, which can help them reduce stress and better manage their workloads.
To get more from your employee initiatives and track employee sentiment in real time, check out Workrowd. Get in touch today to book your demo.











