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Everyone faces workplace stress at some point in their career, but how a company deals with the stress its employees face can affect that company’s bottom line. To do business in today’s world there is a need for a calm, rational, controlled and socially sensitive approach to life and work.

Most of us by now know that having some stress in your life is not a bad thing, but when your stress level gets out of hand it can make you sick and at its worst can kill.  For a company, having employees that are highly stressed can  be a drain on the company’s time and money.  For instance, constant time off work reduces productivity and increases claims on health insurance.  Workplace stress is often caused by a lack of time, excessive workload and a lack of confidence in the employee’s ability to perform the required tasks.  This often leads to poor relations with other employees and management or results in an increase in injury and accidents.

Stress can also be caused by a number of other factors such as:

• boredom
• unrealistic deadlines
• untrained or uninformed support staff
• fear of job loss
• internal office politics
• bullies within the workplace
• noisy work environments
• change
• personality conflicts
• things going on outside the work environment.

Whatever the cause, and it can be a combination of lots of factors, if you do not deal with the issue it can cost your company hundreds of man hours in lost productivity, reduce the creativity you seek to keep your company cutting edge, and see a downturn in profitability.

It makes sense then for a company no matter how small or big, to put in place a strategy to first recognize the signs of stress among their employees:

• Absence from work
• Change in behaviour and/or attitude
• Sudden lack of concentration
• Sudden lack of interest
• Consistent lateness
• Change in appearance
• Lethargy.

The sooner the signs of stress are recognized the sooner action can be taken to deal both with the symptoms and the causes, which in turn minimizes the risks to both the actual employee’s health and the health of those around them and the effect on the company as a whole.

As a manager to help minimize your employees’ stress levels there are a number of things you can do:

• Keep employees informed of what is happening withing the company or department
• Communicate clear goals and objectives.
• Clearly define roles, expectations and lines of communication
• Hold regular meetings, not too many and
• Communicate with your employees to ensure they understand what you require of them, that they have everything they need to accomplish the task
• Listen to them (maybe they have an alternative or better way to accomplish the given task)
• Deal with conflict early on
• Follow up on issues
• Make sure employees’ personal issues are kept confidential
• Admit when you are wrong
• Provide adequate support, ie training.

As an employer, or manager, one of the biggest issues is trying to deal with your stresses and your employees’ stresses at the same time.  It is important to try and find someone within your company, ie, an HR manager, or outside, that can help you handle your everyday stresses too.  A business, or life coach that specialises in the areas of stress, confidence and relaxation can have a big impact on the way you handle your employees and your issues.  As such, Energy, Confidence, Success is here to help you so that you are not trying to resolve issues alone.  Learn how to create calm in your life and work by contacting us here.

A healthy, happy employee will be more:

• creative
• productive
• reliable.

An all around asset to your company.