The first principle of my blog is Creating Ecosystems of Success and two key focus are Career Discussions and Health/Wellness. If you’re a manager in an organization or a business owner, a key consideration is keeping your employees at as low a level of stress as possible. If you can do so, you can get them to give you a consistently high level of productivity. The following contributed post is therefore entitled, Calm In The Cubicle: Encouraging Your Employees To Be Stress-Free.
* * *
What we can suffer from when we are starting out on our business journey is that the business takes priority and not necessarily anything else. You might be working to promote your business day and night, and this can be to the detriment of the most important aspect of your company, the employees. After all, if we overworked and underpaid our employees, how long are they going to stay with us? Not very long. But, if we work at improving our employees, nurturing their capabilities, but also ensuring that they are happy in our working environment, this will naturally translate to productive and efficient work. So we need to think about those employees sat in the cubicle, on their own for hours on end, are they actually being productive? Maybe it’s time to look at the more stressful aspects of work, and eradicating them for good?
What Stresses Out Your Employees?
First things first, we don’t have an open door policy; we need to get this arranged. To get an open dialogue with our employees, we need to have continual contact with them, but we need to find what is making them feel bad. These days, stress and anxiety are two common components of modern living, and this naturally spills into their working lives. Sometimes their working lives are the very reason. If we can start to unravel this by having good quality communication and regular contact with our employees to ensure that we are on top of these issues, we can then put the stops in place that benefits everyone.
Fixing The Space
If you have rows upon rows of cubicles, this needs to go. In addition to this, you may want to take your attitude to the workplace out of the 20th century and bring it bang up to date! To alter the space and make it an environment where employees are not just hemmed in like farmyard animals, you should take inspiration from the more modern startups and make them a talisman for what you want to achieve. There are professionals such as Vertical Interior Design that can help you to redesign your office space so you can get rid of the cubicles and the open plan, and make it a more inclusive and collaborative space. This will help your employees to feel they are in more of a collection which will actually impact their work for the better, but those office cubicles never lend themselves well to communicating with anyone. When you see those offices that are silent and almost ghostly in presence, you’d never expect the environment to be a nurturing one.
Flexibility
If your employees feel that their job is the biggest source of stress in their lives, what you can do to make it easier on them is to employ a more flexible approach to their working day. For example, those busy working parents who are always rushing to get in for 9 in the morning, but always end up being late may feel that they have the Sword of Damocles hanging over their head every time they turn up a little bit late. But instead, why don’t you push the clock back a bit for them? Having a more flexible schedule will make them stress less and work better.
Sourcing The Right Stimuli
Because a typical office is somewhere that’s the very embodiment of drab, or demotivation, or without the right touchstones, you can focus on these negative aspects and they can color your entire attitude to work. So if there is nothing much we can do about this, then we need to work at improving the cognition of our workers by implementing certain things that can help in the long run. The right snacks can be a godsend, especially when you look at the fact that the typical office culture celebrates sugar and greasy carbohydrates in the form of doughnuts and pizza, every time there’s a deadline that is tight or you want to reward your employees. But this only makes them sluggish in the long run. Likewise, if you have a very busy office space, and you have employees that are struggling to focus, you can make the most of various productivity tools to help your workers focus better in this stressful environment. The right noise app can drown out any office hubbub and allow your workers to focus on the task at hand. Likewise, if you’ve got a lot of work that needs doing, and a lot of typing, then voice recognition programs could cut that workload in half!
Stress in the workplace comes in many different ways, shapes, and forms. Work-related stress is very common, but there are the external aspects that can cloud their ability to work as well. If we can encourage a more relaxing environment in the workplace, this will translate to a happier person and a healthier environment.