Productivity is related to human resources performance. Manpower performance has lots of things to do with the ability to deal with stress of life and work. A stressed and distracted worker won’t be the most productive worker. As per ‘Your Life at Work Survey’ by the Globe on over 4000 Canadian respondents, employees with ability to tackle stress also deemed themselves as productive hires, pouring out at least 80% of their efforts into the daily work. Meanwhile, respondents less productive, investing at most 70% into their daily work found it hard to say they can handle well work stress. As revealed in the survey, 3% of informants said that their stress has been serious to the ‘losing it’ level, over 30% felt frustrated, 49% were Ok, and just 9% were happy. Stress is that influential on employee’s work performance. There need really effective ways to cope with it. And effective management techniques should be employed to help employees manage their stress.
1. Practise listening effectively
Improve your communication with the employees
It is an old story that a good employer would listen to their employees and have them feel that their voice is being heard. No one is the same, then you have to figure what each individual needs, values. It would be not that difficult if you have held events and situations of retelling stress that enable the tellers to reprocess feelings and information in new fashions. Telling them to others with an empathetic ear will help stave off isolation and develop the feeling of being understood.
2. Recognize stress types with levels
There needs to recognize your employees’ stress types and their stress levels to lend them a help as quickly and effectively. While motivation comes from a little stress, the stress surpassing normal levels can induce the serious feelings like being hard to focus on work, being irritable, being withdrawn.
3. Encourage stress talks
Being stressed at work is normal. What makes it serious is that it's not talked about and handled well.
You employees are often afraid of showing you that they are being stressful as they know you don’t like it and can view them as being incompetent, less hard working. The more they hide it from you and others, the more they are stressful because there may be no way to let out that stress. While they find it difficult to communicate their problems, you should take initiative to encourage talking about stress, especially when the stress goes beyond the normal levels. Let them know that being stressed at work is normal, and there will be no worry over it if they take some ways to deal with it. When talking to the employee that you are worried about, remember to show your empathy and good will to help.
4. Train your employees on stress discussion and coping with stress
Everyone in your company, not just the supervisory level, have better to know how to talk about the stress and see how to tackle it. Make sure that your entire manpower gets training in being aware of stress and managing it, then all the employees share a common language as well as understanding.
Train your employees about stress management to maintain a resilient organization.
If you give your employees skills to manage their work and stress, you can prevent some workers from being stressed and maintaining a resilient organization.
Such training is called resiliency training in which employees are taught about strategies for handling changes, managing integration of work and life, bettering time management. The programs also encourage exercise and healthful diet. For example, workers are taught to infrequently check email so that they won’t be side-tracked and can limit multitasking to be more efficient, less anxious, distracted and stressed.
5. Train the managers on helping their stressed employees
Sometimes, managers may see that their employees are being stressed, but still ask them to be productive without wanting to help them solve their personal or work issue. That may pressure more and suffocate employees.
Managers play a crucial role in helping their employees manage stress.
Manager should be advised about helping with their employee stress management in a proper way.
6. Let managers lead by example
Quite sure, employees won't dare to have some break throughout the day when working for such a difficult manager.
Employees are much influenced by their managers’ behaviours and attitudes. If the manager is strict with the straight face all around the working day, his/ her employees often don’t dare to have some rest during their tiring working hours. If the manager plans up something like ‘walking meeting’, his/ her workers may feel more encouraged to have some fresh air during the work. If the manager is trying to be active or have a break throughout the working day, his/ her employees may feel less hesitant to step away from their work desks.
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