3 ways HR can help employees deal with stress

How employees deal with stress is becoming more of a pressing concern in today’s workplace. With more onus on wellbeing and work-life balance, understanding, and managing, how staff deal with professional, and personal, anxieties should be at the forefront of any good people strategy.

A recent article in Harvard Business Review looked at the many ways that HR can help workers deal with stress, from the innovative to the outlandish. We have collected three of them below, and accompanied each point with our own research.

1. Don’t be judgemental

When employees are explaining to you how stressed they are feeling, make sure you’re not coming across as overly judgemental or critical. People deal with anxiety and pressure in different ways; your way may not correlate with theirs, but that’s not an excuse to be unapproachable. A recent NHS survey found that 48% of staff would not feel comfortable talking with their bosses about their mental health – a failure, surely, of workforce attitudes, HR and training.