Stress Management

We live in a much faster-paced world that we used to and most people accept and expect stress in their lives as they strive to balance the demands of their work and home lives. Deadlines to meet, changing priorities, longer working hours, e-mails, commuting. Most of us are put under pressure to handle situations that are not life-threatening but nevertheless provoke stress signals. These can lead to a range of unpleasant and debilitating feelings and symptoms, such as headache, backache, stomach upsets, anxiety attacks and lethargy. This in turn leads to lack of productivity, burn-out and long-term illness if not prevented. Stress can also be directly attributable to more fatal illnesses, such as heart disease and cancer. The organisation as a whole may be “sick” and exhibiting signs of low morale, low productivity, increased sickness absence and an upsurge in staff turnover. It is no good just tackling individuals if the reasons for the stress are not dealt with. A healthy workplace is the first step to recovery.

WorkScales offers a range of services to help you combat stress in your organisation, from designing stress assessments geared towards your staff, introducing stress management policies, carrying out stress management workshops for staff and managers to help prevent stress in the workplace, and helping staff who are off sick or suffering from stress.
If you want to know how to prevent or combat stress in the workplace, then contact us now and we will send you details of our workshops.
Stress counselling programmes (usually 6-10 hours in total) are also extremely effective for employees who are suffering from stress.
Although it is generally accepted that some absences cannot be avoided, there are many ways to bring your organisation’s absenteeism rates down and productivity up.

When looking at causes of work-related stress, both the individual and organisational symptoms need to be addressed.
WorkScales recommends an initial stress audit to highlight the areas that the organisation needs to address. A stress management policy should be introduced, which includes looking at the organisation’s management style, support offered to employees, problem-solving capacities, equality issues, bullying, sexual and racial harassment policies, inflexible working hours or long hours culture. The physical environment in which people work also needs to be addressed; staff may well be asked to work in unreasonable conditions, either physically or mentally, and these issues need to be looked at and addressed by senior management.

Ensuring that staff feel valued and motivated towards organisational goals can take longer to implement and this may involve a change of culture – perhaps from a traditional hierarchal structure to a more coaching style of management. Adequate resources need to be allocated to management training, communication and staff training, so that they are all clear about their responsibilities and what the organisation is striving to achieve. Poor management, too much or too little work, lack of training and poor working relationships all have a huge effect on morale and turnover of staff.

Offering your staff some emotional support, such an introducing an EAP and/or stress counselling is recommended, particularly if you wish to avoid the risk of litigation by stressed-out employees. Educating your staff and managers about stress, so that they can recognise it and do something about it before it becomes a problem is also a recipe for keeping the workforce healthy. We run workshops specifically for managers, so contact us today for further details.