Workplace stress - what you can do about it today

These are crazy times  - most office staff are interrupted seven times an hour, taking maybe twenty minutes to re-focus each time. The amount of the day when they can really concentrate deeply on their job is getting smaller every year, and over two hours of each day are lost altogether to distraction.

Other common causes of stress include bullying, overwork with lack of managerial support, poor working culture and environment, plus of course external problems with relationships, finances, housing, children and so on.

It doesn't help that 40% of large companies are in a major restructuring exercise, so staff are worrying about their futures. No wonder so many staff report anxiety, depression, sleep problems and even changes in their personality caused by workplace stress.

You can usually tell when someone is experiencing greater stress than usual - the quality of their work suffers, they may turn up late, become withdrawn, snap at people when they are usually easy going, and so on. We've all been there in fact, so it's not hard to spot.

Let's be clear that some stress is useful, and life gets boring very quickly without adequate stimulation. However, if it gets too much and goes on for too long - and each individual will have their own measure of what counts as too much and too long - people will start to shut down. The results include inability to make decisions, a short fuse, and eventually mental and physical illnesses.

So what to do?

It's important to support the staff who are struggling, of course, and initiatives like mindfulness can be very useful in building resilience in stressed staff. But is it any business of the company to be making people stressed in the first place? Why would a company do something that is acknowledged to reduce productivity and damage people's lives?

The key is to get upstream of the problem - and the further upstream you look, the more you can head off problems before they become embedded, and the more you save from the huge sums spent annually on supporting or replacing stressed staff.

To get upstream means being proactive in diagnosing where the stressors are in working life. Ideally, each manager would be in such regular contact with everyone of their staff, and be so instinctively attuned to their needs and problems, and would have so much spare time and mental capacity, that they can immediately devote as much time as is needed for each problem to be addressed as soon as it starts to arise.

That doesn't happen, so another possibility is to use a survey of some kind to ask the questions. This has the advantage that it gives the management real data on the size and location of the stress points in the business, showing where communications, training, resources, etc. are in need of improvement.

Here's a typical picture from our own system, used with permission - it shows how a small HR department is feeling about work. The chart shows their responses to 16 questions about how well working life actually works for them - we have the highest score anyone has entered in the top grey line, the lowest individual score in the bottom grey line, and the overall picture for the team in the coloured bars.

From the left, the whole team is pretty well connected to the aims of the company and what people need from their work. They understand what they personally should be doing most of the time, share the same picture of the work and think they are co-oerating well.

However, the picture then starts to diverge. Self-rated background knowledge is variable, with at  least one team member under-informed almost half the time. They don't feel they have all the necessary skills, and are definitely under-resourced, so it's no surprise they don't feel competent nearly half the time.

This has probably continued because they aren't getting enough attention from the manager. They have a good common bond or team spirit however, even though the status bar shows they aren't really being acknowledged enough by the organisation.

The results of all this show in the blue bars - these are the emotional consequences of the earlier problems. The team as a whole are feeling insecure, out of control and under pressure about a third of the time, and worry about forthcoming work. That's the overall picture - within this there are some who are really suffering.

However the good news is that the meaning score is high - they want to be there and think it is worthwhile, so if you can help with some of the upstream problems you would have a happier, more productive and more sustainable team. Contact us at WeThrive to find out where the opportunities are to de-stress your staff.