Stress is a recognised medical condition that affects everyone. Whether you’re managing a business or working for one, a stressful environment will negatively affect your work performance.
Aside from its effects on productivity, stress can also have a serious impact on a person’s health and overall wellbeing. It can lead to headaches, chest pains, or even insomnia. In short, stress can greatly reduce a person’s quality of life.
Hence, in order for businesses to survive and thrive, managing stress in the workplace is a must for both managers and workers.
As an employer, here are three ways to do exactly that:
Encourage Healthy Remote Work Practices
Companies had to allow their employees to work remotely at the onset of the pandemic. However, two years in and counting, employers are now choosing to adopt a remote work setup. While this means greater flexibility, it also poses some challenges.
One of the issues is making remote work a healthier option. Today, physical movement in a remote setting consists of getting up to get a snack and then coming back to sit at your desk. Obviously, this can pose serious health risks (and more stress) if left unchecked.
Thus, it’s best to encourage everyone to practice healthy habits. This can include taking regular breaks, exercising regularly, and eating healthy.
Likewise, you can also encourage (or even require) them to wear formal attire or smart casual especially during on-cam meetings. Dressing up is a proven way to put oneself in a more productive mindset, making work more manageable and of course, less stressful.
Promote Open Communication
Remote work is insanely stressful if there’s a breakdown in communication. The resulting misunderstandings often contribute to poor work performance.
Hence the need to establish regular, direct, and open communication. It’s a great and effective way to keep your staff engaged, updated, and occasionally, celebrated.
Communicating directly with your remote workers allows you to identify and address their problems immediately. Whether they’re stressing over a technical issue or encountering roadblocks in meeting their deadlines, you should be the first to know – and to step in.
Re-Examine the Distribution of Work
It’s not enough to encourage employees to take a break – especially when their workloads don’t allow them to.
So, to truly make the working environment less stressful, evaluate everyone’s contributions and deliverables. If someone is taking on too much, it might be necessary to break up the load and distribute it more evenly – or to hire additional hands if it’s well within your hiring budget.
While you’re at it, examine your daily stand-up too. Are you doing too much? Are there things on your plate that you’re better off delegating so you can focus on more important things – such as taking the occasional breather?
Leaders ultimately lead by example and the sooner you adapt healthier habits, the better it will be for everyone else to.
Managers have little to lose yet everything to gain if they invest in their employees. Since your staff help you manage your business, it just makes sense to help them manage their stress in any way you can.
Planning to adopt some or all of these suggestions, but not sure how they would apply to a remote team? You’ve come to the right place.
Remote Staff has been assisting Australian SMEs and entrepreneurs take their businesses off the ground with the help of skilled remote workers from the Philippines. So if you want to lessen your stress by hiring active and skilled employees, we got you covered.
Call us today or schedule a call back and let’s get started.
Serena has been working remotely and writing content for the better part of the last decade. To date, she's written for Pepper.ph and Mabuhay Magazine, among others, and has churned out more than a thousand articles on everything from The Basics of Stock Market Investing to How to Make Milk Tea-Flavored Taho at home.
