Workplace stress is unavoidable. Actually, a certain amount of stress at the office is essential to make sure that employees feel positively challenged, and they continue to develop additional skills and talents. However, for some employees the strain they experience may become overwhelming, leading to frustration, disillusionment, as well as anger. The American Institute of Stress estimates that negative workplace stress costs U.S. companies alone $150 million in losses annually. Additionally, the nation’s Institute of Occupational Safe practices estimates that about 40% of employees experience moderate or “extreme” stress levels.
Moderate or high levels of workplace stress in many cases are associated with:
- Increased absenteeism
- Increased conflict at work
- Reduced productivity
- Poor customer service
- Reduced quality of labor
- Difficulty concentrating
- More workplace injuries
Workplace stress has additionally been linked to hypertension, heart problems, stomach problems, sleep disorders, depression, anxiety, and even problems in employees’ relationships beyond work. If these conditions go unrecognized and untreated they are able to lead to much more serious outcomes for employees and their companies.
As the factors that cause stress can vary according to employees’ occupations or positions, or their sectors, they generally include:
- Not feeling worth work
- Not feeling meaningfully involved with decision-making and problem-solving
- Having insufficient information to do their jobs well
- Having insufficient training or professional development
- A lack of a work and life balance
- Workload issues: Too much work and never enough time
- The physical demands from the job
- Workplace politics, together with a insufficient trust at the office, gossip, and perceived favouratism
- Poor relationships with their co-workers and immediate supervisors
The existence of negative workplace stress might not always be obvious. It is also tough to assess just how much stress employees are experiencing, or even the specific reasons for their stress. In workplaces with separate departments or work locations, levels and results in of stress can vary widely across employee groups. We have also discovered that employees who go through the highest levels of stress report, on average, from 9 to 14 different stress factors. This means that no one solution alone is going to successfully lessen the amounts of workplace stress experienced by these employees.
The good news is that negative workplace stress can be reduced significantly, through the outcomes of strategic planning processes according to formal research findings. Here are some steps that will help you to make sure that your organization has got the cost effective given the time and commitment from the managers and employees who develop a questionnaire, or take part in an emphasis group or interview.
1) Make sure that your employee questionnaire or any other research questions are specially created for your sector or industry. Avoid generic or ‘canned’ questionnaires often available online.
2) Endeavour to incorporate all managers and employees in your study. This could likewise incorporate term employees and people who take presctiption leaves of absence.
3) Ensure that analysis is undertaken not just within the aggregate (i.e., all employees as a single group) but by factors such as employees’ positions, occupations, work locations, education and training, years of experiences, as well as their gender and ages.
4) Ensure that you have the data needed to help you to develop effective stress-reduction strategies. Don’t limit your process to some single question, for example ‘Do you experience workplace stress?’ Drill down with questions for example:
Just how much negative workplace stress do you experience?
What factors cause you stress at work?
What is the impact of workplace stress on your life outside of work, and the other way around?
What strategies would you personally use to resolve your own stress?
How effective are these strategies?
What changes if the company make to help reduce levels of negative workplace stress?
5) Make sure that you get a report that includes a full analysis and interpretation of all of your study findings, both in the aggregate by at least some of the variables noted above (in Point 3). Also ensure that the report features a clear and manageable set of recommendations made to enable you to develop, implement and assess your strategic plan.