Employee Stress Management: 20 Tips You Should Follow

Admin • 2020.12.21

Modern work environments are designed to help employees being motivated and engaged while reducing stress. Many employer branding strategies rely on the improvement of the workplace: open offices, fitness rooms, shared goods are available for all employees. 

However, employee stress management is not just about creating some fancy office – you need to find the real causes and solutions. Especially nowadays: people are working from home, and remote workers can also be stressed. It’s even harder now to recognize if someone is stressed and needs help. 

In this article, we will give you some tips on how to reduce employee stress at work.

Stress in the workplace

Studies show that stressed people are less productive and not just at work. They sleep less, eat unhealthily, and even can feel a downside of their friendships or relationship. It’s easy to get into a loop and feel always depressed, and coming out from that loop is hard.

What are the main work-related stress factors that hold back your employees from being happy and productive? 

1. Money: low salaries cause stress for many people.
2. Time management: working overtime and even at the weekend is stressful. 24/7 working availability is an unrealistic (but pretty common) expectation 
3. Workload: with these high expectations come challenging tasks. Working on a project without the knowledge to solve it cause stress
4. No guidelines: If the managers don’t give their workers enough time or education to support them in their tasks, an employee can feel overwhelmed
5. No opportunities: corporates need to give straightforward career paths and goals to their employees. Lack of opportunity leads to stress

There are many ways for your employees to reduce stress at work: but you have to help them fight that stress, or even better: prevent your colleagues from getting into stressful situations. 

Stress management during COVID: working from home is stressful too

Home office opportunities are getting more and more popular each year, and the pandemic just accelerated this trend. Now people who are not used to working from home have to deal with struggles: they need to learn how to use new software programs and do their job remotely.  

With COVID-19 new stress, factors have emerged:  stress factors a manager didn’t necessarily deal with before. Layoffs, job redundancies, payment cuts, worries about getting sick are struggles for an employee.

Working from home is hard for many people because the whole family has to stay inside and share the rooms and tools. Support your employees that have children! On the other hand, if someone is living alone and isolated that can be mentally tough too. 

You have to support every employee with different problems in these trying times. We will give you some tips on how to do that.

Reduce stress at the workplace

How to handle stress at work? How to avoid employee burnout? You need to provide appropriate support: be flexible, give resources, social support, manage the workloads and shifts. 

But first of all, start with yourself: see if you have a clear company vision communicated to your employees, investigate your leadership structure and roles, give feedback, and understand your job responsibilities. 

20 tips on how to avoid employee stress at work

1. Open door policy: leave your door open for everyone. Communicate, make your employees feel free to ask questions
2. Be flexible: leave the strict 8:30 am – 4:30 pm work culture. Work with a project-based mindset, not a time-based one
3. Maintain healthy eating habits: provide healthy food and snacks
4. Organize a fitness challenge: physical activities can reduce stress
5. Start walking: creating walking groups and walking meetings is a great way to refresh your employees
6. Use wellness incentives: smoking cessation, weight loss, maintaining a healthy lifestyle contribute to fighting stress
7. Meaningful meetings: skip the meetings that are just wasting time. Organize meaningful meetings with the necessary information
8. Clear communication: how hard did the pandemic hit your organization? Your employees want to know if they should worry about it or not. Communicate clearly!
9. Clear expectations: raise expectations uniquely for every employee. Don’t make high standards
10. Career routes: provide transparent career goals for your colleagues
11. Leave the micro-management: your workers should have the opportunity to ask for help if needed, but don’t micromanage them all the time. Trust your colleagues
12. Give them the necessary equipment: do research what your workers need to work more efficiently
13. Gather feedback regularly: listen to your coworkers and implement changes
14. Organize team-building activities: make memories together.
15. Create a pleasant working atmosphere: be a workplace where work is a joy

On top of that, we have some tips on making remote working better:

1. Turn on your cameras: face to face calls can help to replace social interaction
2. Organize stress management webinars
3. Ensure that your employees live healthy with an employee wellness program. 
4. Help your colleagues with guidelines in creating routines and defining boundaries
5. Use the right software programs and tools that are available for everyone (and easy to learn). Fitpuli helps you with that.

Enjoy the benefits of employee stress management

With effective ways to relieve stress, you can enjoy all the benefits of your employee stress management. A stressed worker has more missed days, decreased productivity, and a higher chance of leaving your company and seeking a low-stress job. People will search for an opportunity that is better to maintain a work-life balance. 

The advantages of having a corporate stress management program are:

• Having a strong company culture and employer branding
• Your employees sick days will drop
• You can save money on health insurance costs
• It boosts your employees’ motivation and productivity 

Summary

Reducing job stress leads to significant achievements. It’s inevitable to create a corporate stress management strategy and prevent employee-dissatisfaction. A stressful employee can be frustrated, have frequent headaches, insomnia, trouble in learning and concentrating, and make decisions. 

You have to step in front and work on your communication, corporate environment, and wellness possibilities. Create a secure job for your employees and make them feel secure.