An organization is as good as its workforce. Their mental well-being is crucial to boost productivity and bring financial or non-financial success to the organization. It’s very important to have a peaceful and stress-free mind to do justice to the quality of work.
However, with mounting work pressure and heavy deadlines to match, stress at work is on the rise, resulting in gradual disinterest and non-cooperation down the line. It’s a roadblock that impacts your staff’s motivational drive to get things done.
High-maturity organizations have come to the realization that managing stress is key to smoothing out workloads and ensuring the workforce being tapped into remains productive.
Here are some tips that will come in handy to manage employee stress:
1. Set Realistic goals
No matter how talented an employee is, there’s only so much he/she can accomplish in a certain time period. Hence, it’s crucial to define realistic goals for them. Only when they know it’s attainable will they work towards it. It assures them that their efforts aren’t wasted. Besides setting a goal, conveying your vision helps them understand why they are doing it. Having purpose to a goal adds more meaning to work and also helps them stay laser-focused on it.
This is not all! It also helps employees measure their personal progress which is rewarding and provides a sense of accomplishment, which keeps their stress levels in check. Setting realistic timelines motivates the employees to attain these goals which also helps them grow individually. Besides, it helps you not overload them with tasks which is obviously a stress-reliever for them.
2. Time Management
With multiple projects in-line, managers are likely to face a time crunch which causes chaos and work-delays. Moreover, with constant pressure to meet customer’s expectations and give a tough chase to competitors, this chaos might cause them to overlook high priority tasks. The quality of deliverables not only gets hit adversely but also creates the stress of having to redo things all over again. To prevent this from happening, proper time management is imperative. It helps you focus on individual tasks which play a pivotal role in the project’s success and lets you schedule activities in the order of importance.
While scheduling tasks to resources, it’s important to stay informed of their availability and bandwidth to take up new tasks and leaves, if any. To simplify this tedious process, a resource management software gives unconditional visibility into the project schedule, which lets you take unplanned absences and requests for time off into account. It will enable managers to allocate tasks seamlessly based on employee availability and even keep a back-up plan ready in case the resource you had in mind is away or already stretched onto other tasks running in parallel. This maintains balance at workplace as everyone is assigned an equal amount of work which takes the load off everyone’s shoulders.
3. Team building
A project only succeeds when team works in cohesion. It’s important for employees to collaborate and work together in order to get things done. It helps you diversify skills and accomplish project tasks faster. Mutual understanding and trust between employees are necessary to ensure a healthy work environment. This will boost productivity and will keep your employees’ content at workplace.
To build this connect between them, organizing team building activities plays is important. Arranging ice breaker sessions, celebrating breakthroughs and gamifying work to score performance are some of them. It will not only build healthy team dynamics, but will also help you ensure that none of the employee’s skills are overlooked or under-utilized. Not only this, timely breaks from work increases employee productivity and enhances employee engagement helping them stay stress-free.
4. Conflict resolution
It’s natural to have differences in opinions when people are working in a team. However, when mindsets don’t align and differences in opinions are not accepted, it leads to conflicts. This creates tension in the work environment and employees are disheartened and lose their will to work for the company. This might even cause you to lose employees to other employers. To keep this in check, it’s of prime importance to mediate and resolve the conflict before it impacts work quality.
Communication and collaboration go a long way in maintaining healthy work culture. When employee’s opinions and thoughts are addressed well, they feel valued. Not only this, communicating helps you reach a middle ground which resolves conflicts and motivates the talent pool to work for the enterprise. After all, they are the driving force of your organization. Keeping employees happy and valuing their inputs drives them to work every day and also helps them manage stress at work.
5. Performance appraisal
Employees thrive on feedback. Timely review of their work, communicating their strengths and weaknesses provides them enough space to grow. It strengthens your decision-making ability by giving you clarity on whose performance reached the expected mark and whose didn’t. You can initiate performance improvement measures based on these reports. Also, when employees are aware of the metrics they are weighed upon, it lets them play to their strengths.
Besides this, employees feel motivated to work on the areas of improvement and work with all their might to widen the client base of an enterprise. This bolster both business reputation and service performance. It even creates more learning opportunities for employees and trains them for skills they can do full justice to. This not only helps them grow professionally, but also helps you bridge skills gap thus controlling your and your employee’s stress levels.
Over to you
Employees are the backbone of your organization. Their performance decides the quality that you deliver to your client. Once you know your employees are stressed, when your business feels the pinch becomes a question of time. You can take the measures discussed above to manage and in time, lower stress. At the end, engaging the hearts, minds and hands of talent is the most sustainable source of competitive advantage.
Author bio :
Mahendra Gupta is PMP certified and an expert authority in the project resourcing domain. He is a resource management and workforce planning subject matter expert at Saviom Software. His wealth of experience has helped over 40+ multinational businesses around the globe transform their project portfolio. Follow his work here.
