There is good stress and there is bad stress. The good kind is necessary for survival and involves the fight-or-flight response. Unfortunately, chronic bad stress induces the same responses, but the body never gets the chance to reset itself. Living in a nearly constant state of stress causes all sorts of maladies including elevated blood pressure, poor-quality sleep, digestive problems and a weak immune system.
If you think stress isn’t prevalent, you would be wrong. According to the American Psychological Association’s 2019 Stress in America survey, “More than three-quarters of adults report physical or emotional symptoms of stress, such as headache, feeling tired or changes in sleeping habits” and “Nearly half of adults say they have laid awake at night because of stress in the prior month.”
When I work with companies that determine workplace stress is affecting the quantity and quality of work performed by their employees, we begin by finding out the main source(s) of the tension. Some of them come prepared with an anonymous employee survey, which speeds up the process.
A common stressor is differing expectations of productivity between upper management and the employees who actually perform the tasks. If management determines that each employee in the widget department should be able to produce 10 widgets per hour with no defects, and the actual number employees are able to produce without defects per hour is five, that is quite a disconnect and will understandably affect morale and cause negative stress in the workforce.
Another stressor I find on a frequent basis is management’s inflexibility toward the time an employee must be present at the office. If an employee is required to be at their desk from nine to five no matter what, that person is going to experience a high-stress level each time a situation occurs that causes a conflict.
In the meantime, how can you manage negative stress in your daily life and the lives of your employees when it originates from your work environment?
I often suggest upper management should allow people to develop new skills. New skills can give them new tools to solve problems on the job, which reduces stress. A course on time management skills may help employees to prioritize their work and learn to control what they can and avoid dwelling on things they can’t control.
It is also important to give employees time to reflect on past successes. Having an employee of the month award, or some similar form of recognition, would be one way to accomplish this.
There are various ways to combat stress in a person-by-person format. The Mayo Clinic suggests that each person make a stress inventory, writing down for one to two weeks every time they feel stressed, including a short explanation of each situation. Once they understand what drives them in those situations, they can begin to find ways to alter either the reoccurring situation or their reoccurring response to the situation.
Negative stress is not a situation that will get better when left alone. It is prevalent, and it is detrimental to the quality of life. There is no reason not to tackle it head on to improve the quality of life for yourself and your employees.
This article has previously been published on Forbes.