The very real issue of dealing with stress at work is a common management conundrum. In 2017/18, stress, depression or anxiety accounted for 57% of working days lost due to ill health. http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/causdis/stress.pdf
We’ve all been stressed at work, and although some pressure can be good and some people work well under pressure, others do not, and when we are put under continual pressure, crossing the boundary between feeling motivated and feeling overwhelmed can be all too easy. No-one can function properly when dealing with stress at work begins to overshadow everything else. And taking the statistics available into account and the mounting evidence of the huge impact that stress has on our working lives, we at Cafe Therapy feel that recognising the symptoms early should be a key managerial skill.
What are the common triggers for stress? What are the signs? What is your company approach to dealing with stress at work? How easy do you think your people would find it to ask for help if they are coming under too much pressure? Once you have started to ask all these questions, you can see how to move forward. The first step is always a review of the current situation – where are we now? We call this a stress risk assessment. You can make a start by looking at things like how often your staff take sick leave, what staff turnover looks like and how easy it is to hire and retain good people. Deeper insights can be gained by asking your staff their opinions, and we can help you there.
So what triggers stress?
Excessive workload and poor interpersonal relationships come top. If you have too much work to do in the time available or you don’t get on very well with your colleagues, it is likely you will feel stressed. And if you have little say over how you do your job and you don’t get the support you need from your boss then this is a really toxic mix that could make you ill.
How can we manage stress?
At the organisational level, create the right corporate culture and work environment. At the team level, train your managers and supervisors to spot the early signs and have the skills to intervene to address issues as they arise. And at the individual level, develop personal resilience skills and encourage a healthy work-life balance.
Dealing with stress at work – a partnership with Cafe Therapy.
We facilitate conversations, and we listen. We use surveys and focus groups to identify the issues. We then offer a range of training workshops for your people, management skills development and organisation-wide wellbeing campaigns to address the issues identified. We also evaluate the impact of interventions in terms of return on investment and we help you create an approach that embeds stress management into your corporate culture, making it easy for you to keep on track once you have started implementing improvements.
