People in North America are some of the most stressed-out in the world when it comes to how they feel at work. According to a recent Gallup poll, 57 percent of US and Canadian employees said they felt stressed at work on a daily basis. Stress is very damaging to the body, and can lead to lack of sleep, heart disease, and diabetes. That’s one of many reasons we need to address stress in the workplace.
Luckily, there are important changes that employees and their supervisors can make to decrease our stress at work. Remember, it is ultimately in your manager’s best interest that their team feels calm and able to function without stress. That helps work get done in a quality and timely manner and eliminates costly and time-intensive consequences of high employee turnover.
Project management platforms are easy ways to help manage the work of individuals and teams. These tools can help teams understand all the tasks necessary for completing a project, can help track deadlines, can assign jobs to different team members, can monitor the difficulty level of tasks, and more. Managers and employees can both see how much work needs to get done, which can help with dividing labor and not assigning more than a team can handle at once. See The Balance’s list of best project management platforms.
Checking-in on a weekly basis with managers, employees, and teams can help everyone keep track of what’s going on. Everyone takes turns briefly sharing what they’re working on and what they need from others to complete their assignments. This can also help managers understand workload, so that they’re not over-assigning projects or committing their team to something they can’t accomplish. One-on-one check-ins between employees and their supervisors are also important to schedule on a regular basis so that employees can share how they’re feeling with the workload and work through problems.
Having flexibility to work remotely, even occasionally, can help employees feel less stressed if they have a difficult commute, are balancing the schedules of multiple family members, or need to attend doctor's visits, school meetings, or other personal commitments. Allowing for flexibility in scheduling can also help with employee health and productivity long-term.
It’s incredibly important to get comfortable asking for help. If you feel you’ve been assigned too much work or a task that’s too complex for your skill level, it’s beneficial to everyone to ask for time to problem solve or brainstorm different approaches with your team. Creating an environment in the workplace where people can speak up and feel listened to when they run into problems will help businesses create better products and services for their customers in the long-run.
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