03.05.2022

How can managers overcome the wave of employee stress?

By Gill Tanner, Senior Behavioural Scientist at CoachHub

A quarter of the UK’s workforce is now suffering with work-related stress, depression, or anxiety. It’s easy to understand why – companies have seen significant flux in the workplace recently due to digitisation and shifts between hybrid and remote working. Stress not only affects the individual worker, but can have a significant adverse impact on the company’s performance, as well as the wider employee community.

Managers and leaders have a duty to support their staff with stress, but in many organisations, the wellbeing offering falls short. Less than half (38%) of those responsible for HR in their company offered wellbeing assistance in the last 18 months, despite the urgent need for it. Now is the time to turn the tide on employee stress and provide a holistic approach to stress management to truly support all staff.

Understanding the causes of stress in the workplace

Everyone experiences stress occasionally, especially in particularly busy periods or times of great change. Hybrid working, for example, has certainly generated new types of stress. There is a tendency amongst many employees to work longer hours when at home as there is nothing to break up leaving work and going home. When home also becomes a place of work, it is difficult to distinguish between the two, and employees can find it difficult to switch off.

Hybrid working is a relatively new trigger for anxiety in the workplace, alongside other more long-standing causes. When stress becomes an everyday problem for a large proportion of staff, it could signal a broader issue with an organisation’s culture. To understand if employee stress is a cultural issue, consider the expectations that are set for staff. If managers have high workloads and are working after hours on a regular basis, it sets a precedent for employees to do the same, inevitably increasing stress in the long run. If employee time away from work is not respected, and breaks not encouraged, a stressful culture will develop.

Stress is therefore often not caused by work itself, but by the environment in which work is being carried out.

The true cost of workplace stress

People often think of stress first in terms of how it impacts the individual, as stress is a deeply personal experience. Such consequences include poor motivation and performance in the short-term, which can even result in ill-health or accidents in the long run.

It is important to remember that employee stress also affects the organisation. Poor motivation and performance leads to missed targets and lower quality work, which in turn affects the company’s outputs, and ultimately, its profits. Stress touches every aspect of an organisation on a daily basis, and as such it is wise to manage it appropriately.

Time for a strategic reassessment of stress management

Leaders who witness an increase in stress amongst their employees are advised to take a step back and reassess their current stress management strategy. This can include asking for employee feedback on existing support mechanisms and pinpointing specific causes of stress in their employees. This will provide leaders with valuable insight which they can use to implement specific stress reduction practices.

Driving cultural shift in an organisation is not something that can be done overnight and needs careful consideration on the part of leaders across all departments. HR can play an important role here by supporting leaders to find long-term, tangible solutions to the unique problems faced within their organisation, and work on changing expectations of employees to create a healthier working environment. Workplace stress requires an organisational reset that can only be achieved through long-term mindset shifts.

In a practical sense, a huge variety of digital technologies now exist to support managers with stress management strategies, helping people to work smarter, not harder. For example, whilst it may not seem like a targeted wellbeing tool, increasing your organisation’s use of automation can help to eliminate mundane tasks, or better structure the day, giving employees more time to work on their key, value-add tasks. Additionally, workplace coaching is a strong solution to guide employees through their personal and professional challenges, with advancements in technology now allowing coaching to take place digitally, increasing convenience for the employee. Coaches can support employees with stress reduction in their day-to-day work, ultimately contributing to overall stress reduction across the organisation.

By analysing the levels of employee stress in the current environment, and providing tangible solutions that work for individuals, managers can, little-by-little, begin to address stress in the workplace.

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