How You Can Help Your Employees Develop Stress Management

The stresses in the modern workplace are innumerable. We have undergone a fundamental shift in workplace culture in the last decade. Regardless of the causes, it is now a fact of life. It means more work for employees and more pressure for everybody from top to bottom. Unfortunately, more work and fewer staff leads to more stress. Today, the ability to cope with stress is vital in the workplace, but not everybody is able to adapt. Read on to find out how you can help your employees embrace difficulties and develop stress management. 

The soft skill stress management

What would you say is the most important soft skill? Would it be flexibility? Or maybe it is teamwork? However, none of these could possibly develop if your employees cannot cope with work stress. Stress is about emotional regulation, amongst other things. Without stress management, tempers fray, arguments ensue and people get ill (physically and mentally). The costs to your business are potentially immense. This is not a good situation for anybody.

The causes of workplace stress

We experience stress every day in our lives. When we talk about stress in the workplace, we mean those cases where stress becomes problematic. Without effective stress management, there comes a point where most people crack under the pressure. Examples include:

• Too much work to do in too little time (too many deadlines at once)
• Too few employees to cope with increasing workload
• Struggling to adapt to new roles, too many tasks for one person
• Feeling a lack of guidance or support from colleagues or line managers
• Poor performance by the business putting jobs at risk
• Friction due to personality clashes
• Problems at home spilling over into the workplace

Stress is a major cause of mental illness and one that we must all take seriously. When it occurs, businesses are obliged to help. Bookboon has a solution that means you need not wait until it is too late.

The costs of stress

Most stresses are good for us. The short deadline, the client problem, the system failure, the sudden sickness – all of these place stresses on us. Without stresses, we will never come up with solutions. Without stress and difficulty, we will not adapt. Without stress, we never evolve as people or employees. These types of stress are character building, good for personal development and to our overall benefit.

Yet when stress becomes too much, there are significant costs to your business and the employee. A study recently reported the cost of stress to the UK economy in 2014 was £6.5bn or approximately €7.7bn. Some 10 million workdays were lost due to stress in the same year.

A Doctor or Physician may “sign off” the employee from doing certain tasks. They could conceivably sign them off from work completely. You will still need to pay this employee but will lose their valuable skills for a while. Even when an employee does not go home, their concentration and attention span is lower than normal. Either way, there will be greater stress on the employees expected to pick up the slack. If it seems like a vicious circle, that is because it is. Fortunately, there is an effective solution every business can implement.

Here are some simple measures for combatting stress

Stress management is now one of the core soft skills in the workplace. Businesses crave it for the modern workplace, but many people still do not have it. The reason is that they have not received the proper training in stress management. Thankfully, Bookboon has a comprehensive eBook library that helps your employees develop soft skills like coping with stress.

Too much stress is no good for anybody, yet we cannot eliminate stress from our workday. With Bookboon’s eLibrary you can help your employees develop their soft skills like stress management and maximise your organisation’s productivity.

Test Bookboon’s eLibrary with this free demo.