How Corporate Stress Management Helps Workforce

Your amazing workforce are your biggest asset. Your staff are the nuts and bolts of what drives your business to success!

Do you look after staff like you look after your customers?

Businesses invest huge sums of money into their marketing, why not in staff? And I mean properly, not just ticking a box.

How does stress negatively impact on staff, business, productivity and turnover?

A survey was conducted in 2012 by ComPsych (www.compsych.com) in which they surveyed 2500 employees. Its main findings were that stressors like workload, people issues, lack of work/life balance and job insecurity are likely to cause reduced levels of productivity at work. And guess what? Things haven’t improved since then.

There has been a wealth of studies conducted that have researched what factors affect work performance, including how this is impacted by stress levels and how valued staff feel in the workplace.

A study was conducted by the University of Bahrain which is published in the Business and Management Research Journal. This is titled ‘How stress can affect your work performance’. This research paper was conducted by Dr. Muwafaq Alkubaisi (2015) One of main findings of the study was that work stress has a negative impact on employee’s performance.

This is one of a plethora of studies, which show similar findings.

THESE ARE THE LONG TERM EFFECTS

Stressed employees negatively impact on business growth

Sapping away the longevity of the success of the business leads to financial constraints and many other related problems.

The ComPsych survey as referred to above reportedly established the five main reasons why stressed out employees are killing off your economic growth:

Increased absenteeism

Nearly 15% of respondents surveyed said that stress causes them to miss days from work. You may think they just have a bad immune system, but the truth is that at least some of the time, employees are having to stay off work out of necessity.

Missed deadlines and mistakes

Over 20% of those surveyed directly attributed stress to missed deadlines and mistakes in their work. Not only is work taking longer to get done, but mistakes are causing additional slowdowns.

Lack of focus

It’s hard enough for some workers to focus in an office environment; add in extreme levels of stress, and you have a perfect recipe for distraction. Over 56% of participants reported that they had trouble focusing due to stress. Employees may look like they’re working, but it’ll take longer for them to complete tasks than usual.

Tardiness

That once-bright employee who is suddenly 15 to 45 minutes late several times a week? This is directly linked to burnout. Over 14% of employees said that job-related stress increased their lateness.

Interpersonal difficulties

Over 15% of participants said that stress within the job made it difficult for them to connect or get along with superiors and coworkers.

So take some time out now to consider how you are looking after your employees. Or how you feel yourself as an employee within your organisation. Do you feel valued? Do you have a sense of motivation and pride? Do you feel real worth? Are you able to approach your manager with ease if you have any work or personal problems you need to share?

CEO’s / HR / Managers – what to do?

Get down to staff level. Are your staff satisfied in their job? Do they feel listened to and heard? Are they burnt out much of the time? Is there regular moaning and complaining? Regular staff sickness absences? Are staff able to talk about any work or personal issues to their direct line manager? Are staff constantly putting in extra hours to catch up?

Many organisations are impacted, but CEO’s struggle to recognise any links. There is no understanding of investment now leads to a mass of long term gains including improved productivity, reduced staff turnover, and increased morale. 

Employees receive huge value in stress management and resilience training. It allows them to look at things in a new perspective and provides practical and highly effective techniques to enable them to create strategies and to provide them with a great ability to cope with work pressures placed on them. It will in turn improve productivity, reduce staff absenteeism and improve staff morale.

What is not investing in your staff costing you financially per year? 

Did you know that a happy and resilient workforce can directly impact on the following? 

• Increased productivity and higher profits
• Less stress and fatigue 
• Targets and deadlines met
• Reduction in staff absenteeism 
• Improvement in staff morale and staff feeling valued

What are you going to do differently within your organisation?

It really is a win-win. You can never underestimate the importance of looking after your biggest asset. You'd be amazed at the results and benefits both in the long and short terms. 

Janine is the founder of Change for Success. She helps you achieve high performance in your organisation. She does this by helping you lower stress in your teams and to help your workforce be more resilient. This is through coaching, consultancy and through the delivery of stress management workshops and programmes. 

Contact her today for a no obligation chat to find out how she can help you and your teams be the best at what they do, high performing, resilient, stress free and happy employees.