Stress in the workplace is the most common obstacle in fulfillment of the organizational goals. It can hinder the team spirit, create tension, depression, and pit everyone against each other. Furthermore, it’s unavoidable. Work will always carry pressure, and even the toughest employees will find themselves stressed out at some point. There’s no way to avoid the work pressure. That being said, there are however ways to deal with it.
Being a manager comes with the responsibility to help your team cope with workplace stress. Following are some tips to help you do that:
1. Make a plan
Quite often employees don’t understand what’s expected of them. When you’re explaining your long-term goals for the next 6 months in a meeting, most of them are wondering when you’re gonna tell them what to do.
In order to work efficiently, your employees must be able to make sense of what you are asking of them. Being a leader you must know all the procedures and how-tos of conducting a project so that your employees don’t have to. Your job is to assign proper tasks. Effective communication is very critical when explaining a long-term plan to your employees. You must understand that each of your employee’s knowledge is limited to his/her niche, and it’s upon you to collaborate their efforts. But also make sure that they understand how their efforts are going to collaborate.
2. Secure Feedback Channel
There can also be hidden tension in the workplace, issues underlying deep within that needs to be called out. Issues like bullying, harassment, and discrimination. Your employees won’t just come out with them expecting an instant action. They fear persecution for voicing their concerns. Employ YourSafeHub, an anonymous reporting channel that let your employees report such incidents without exposing themselves.
Ensure them that thorough investigation will take place against the accused and strict action will be taken against perpetrators.
3. Avoid Unnecessary Delay
Procrastination can be very harmful in the long run. A few simple tasks being postponed over and over again will pile up and prove to be extremely stressful. Make sure to resolve them timely and avoid unnecessary delay.
Allow your employees to take some time off in the absence of any tasks. This will create a habit of punctuality to resolve all the tasks as soon as they are assigned.
4. Train your workforce
Many times, when there’s a surplus in the amount of work coming in, your employees might get a bit overwhelmed. That huge pile of tasks can hinder the rhythm of your workplace and ultimately hamper the overall growth of the organization. Your employee must always be prepared to handle that kind of pressure.
Following are a few tips you could use yourself and give to your employees to stay emotionally stable and effective when a huge amount of work piles up:
- Whenever they face intense work pressure and get hopeless about meeting deadlines, remind them of their success stories in the past. A reminder of tougher times can always make the situation more bearable, especially the ones where they succeeded. Bring back their confidence by showing yours. Let them know that you believe in them and their efforts.
- A regular reminder of the upcoming deadlines will only make the situation worse if your employees are already stressed. Avoiding deadlines is not always an option, but your employee’s mental health is certainly more important.
- Even though high work pressure demands strict attention, the brain demands regular intervals. A 10-minute break every few hours can boost productivity in an instant. When your employee gets stuck on something, allow him a break to take a walk and get some wind to clear the mind.
- Train your workforce to report any issues that they might be facing from the other employees. Nobody likes to be a rat, so you might never find out where the lack of effort and indiscipline is coming from. Furthermore, employees are also prone to many underlying issues like bullying and harassment from other employees. Employ YourSafeHub in your organization to provide them with an anonymous channel to report such issues.
5. Simplify tasks before assigning them
All tasks are sub-tasks.
Every task is a sub-task to a bigger objective. If your task is to double the sales by the end of October, it’s a subtask to ‘Double the profit’. Breaking down tasks is always the most efficient and effective way to do things. It certainly decreases the pressure associated with a certain task that seemed difficult at first. Break down tasks into smaller and easier sub-tasks to be assigned individually based on areas of expertise. This way everyone is given a chance to work at his or her full potential and collaborate as a team.
6. Learn From Mistakes
Stick to your plan till the end, even if it’s proving to be poor. This is useful in the long run, as you can learn from any mistakes you made. Don’t scrap the whole thing if it doesn’t work out. Evaluate where things went bad and what were the strengths and weaknesses of your plan. This will help you formulate excellent strategies based on experience.
Weed out any problems and incompetencies that proved to be a barrier in your run. Focus on all the things that made it better. There’s no sense in stressing over the same mistakes over and over again.