Career Advice
Is Your Team Stressed Out? Here's How You Can Help
Is your team stressed out? Learn how you can help your people better navigate through stress and change.
Workplace stress is a common issue that can affect many factors including morale and capacity. In fact, an eye-opening study found that 60% of workers believe mental health affects their productivity at work. Studies show that in a normal year, more than 200 million workdays are lost due to mental health conditions ($16.8 billion in employee productivity).
But working with your organization to prioritize training and support for employees around mental health and workplace stress can often feel like a big job for just one person or team. As a leader, you know how difficult it can be to make widespread structural changes in a company. Because the journey towards organization-wide efforts can be long, it’s a good idea to tackle smaller, more practical steps to take the pressure off in the short term.
What can you do today about workplace stress?
As a team leader or manager, here are several relatively straightforward ways you can help keep your employees healthier and more productive during difficult times:
- Be honest and transparent: Communicate with your team often, clearly and transparently. Discuss what’s happening now and what the possibilities are for the future—even the uncomfortable possibilities. Research shows that being transparent about worst-case scenarios builds trust. (It also stops gossip and rumors, another significant source of stress.)
- Collaborate with employees: Give employees a say in decisions that affect them—from defining work-at-home rules to major changes in the organizational structure. Not only does collaboration give employees a sense of control and value, it often leads to more innovative ideas and outcomes.
- Make work manageable: Clarify project priorities, so everyone knows exactly what’s critical and what can wait. Break up large projects into a series of small steps. Small victories help employees feel productive and useful—which leads to more productivity and less stress.
- Be flexible and realistic: Set deadlines, workload and performance expectations that take work-life balance into account. If possible, have one-on-one meetings with each employee so you can understand each person’s unique situation.
- Encourage employees to use their benefits: Many organizations offer benefits that help employees deal with stress, like mental health helplines, fitness programming, or information on stress-reduction techniques. Be sure your employees know how to access and use these benefits. (Also, be sure everyone is up to date on current sick leave and related policies.)
Workplace stress is not an anomaly
During the last few years, an unclear future plus personal concerns and unique workplace challenges have sent employee stress and anxiety to a whole new level. Even now, as most workplaces have established a new normal, stress remains prevalent. By using the lessons learned during the pandemic years, you can help alleviate your employees’ stress in the future.
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