4 Tips for reconciling the irony of stress and productivity in the workplace

What’s impacting performance in the workplace more than anything else these days?  Many people would say it is stress, which is pushing some to the point of full-blown mental health issues.

Consider how Graeme Cowan, author of Back From the Brink, describes this reality in the Fall 2014 issue of Global Corporate Xpansion Magazine:

“In a hypercompetitive global economy, organizations must be ‘on’ 24/7. Yet this scramble for perpetual performance is taking a harsh toll on employees. They relentlessly push to get ahead and stay ahead- working longer days, emailing after hours, taking fewer vacations- often with little acknowledgement for their efforts. The result is a workforce that’s not just disengaged (Gallup’s 2013 State of the American Workplace report revealed that 70 percent of U.S. employees fall into this category), but also stressed and depressed. 

And here’s the irony. The constant hustle aimed at increasing productivity and profitability actually decreases both.”[i]

 

So what should you do as an employer to combat this irony?

1. Assess both the level of stress and the causes of stress in your workforce. Developing and administering an organizational survey to assess the level of stress in employees can help you effectively develop a plan to reduce stress levels at the workplace through policies, practices and programs.  You can’t know what to change if you don’t know what the sources of issues are.  In addition, if you do put a plan in place, you can’t know if and how you’ve improved if you don’t have baseline measurements to compare.
2. Provide stress management training to your staff.  Providing stress management training to your employees can help increase productivity and profitability in the workplace.  Hopefully you have committed to assessing the stress level of your organization (see #1) and have a skilled training provider that can take that information and develop a customized stress management program for your organization.
3. Analyze your talent management processes, particularly your selection process. Does it assess people for organizational and job fit?  For more reading on this, check out an article I published inHR Alabama– see page 16. If people aren’t aligned with the organizational purpose and the job purpose, stress is bound to ensue, leading to decreased productivity.
4. Design policies, procedures and tools that allow people to work smarter not harder and that put controls in place to keep people from falling victim to the toll that working 24/7 takes.

For more food for thought on this see:

Flexibility to Reduce Workplace Stressors

Should Employers Ban Email after Work Hours?

Stress Leave

Need more help as an employee or employer to manage stress?   Download Stress Management: How to Deal with Stress in the Short and Long Term