How to Reduce Workplace Stress and Anxiety?
If you own a business or manage employees, it’s crucial to help alleviate their stress and anxiety as much as possible.
Stress is costly to your company because it:
- Kills productivity and efficiency
- Results in expensive turnover rates
- Increases the likelihood of errors
- Leads to severe workplace accidents
- Makes it harder to hire top talent
You can help increase your revenue by reducing the costs caused by a high-stress work environment.
Here are some key ways you can lessen unnecessary stress for your employees.
Ways to Avoid High Stress and Anxiety in the Workplace
In order to help your team be at the top of their game, you can take action to help alleviate stress and anxiety.
Allow Employees to Have Input
Getting a “buy-in” from employees helps them become part of the team and not just the workforce.
As often as possible, get employee input to help streamline processes and reduce tension in the workplace.
Not only should you check in regularly with employees to get their ideas, but you should also enable employees to give feedback anonymously.
Your employees are more likely to report issues that you may not be aware of if they aren’t afraid of blowback.
Give Regular Movement Breaks
Extended sitting can be very hard on employee health.
If you have employees that are regularly behind desks, encourage regular movement breaks.
The Mayo Clinic recommends movement every 30 minutes.
This doesn’t need to be a long break or a highly active movement—even standing to stretch would work.
Consider how you can allow employees to stand during certain tasks or incorporate movement into their daily schedules to break up the sedentary routine that leads to poor health, like:
- Increased stress and tension
- High blood pressure
- High blood sugar
- Excess body fat
- High cholesterol levels
- Risk of heart disease and cancer
Don’t Micromanage
You will add stress to both yourself and your employees if you micromanage their work.
Hire good workers and then trust them.
If you have to micromanage tasks and stay on top of your employees, there is a deeper problem permeating your company culture.
Set clear expectations and be consistent so your employees can succeed without someone over their shoulder.
Celebrate successes and make sure your employees know how much you value their hard work.
Stay in Communication
Yearly reviews can be a serious point of anxiety for many employees.
Encourage your employees whenever you are noticing great work or work that needs improvement.
By letting them know your concerns or providing encouraging insight (without micromanaging their work), they can make adjustments.
If you only hold yearly reviews, they will feel stressed about the potential outcome.
Yearly reviews should only be a summary and never a surprise if you want to reduce anxiety in the workplace.
Encourage End of Day
Really push your employees to step away from the workplace and fully “clock out.”
Even if they are remote or taking work home with them, they need to have a clear distinction between working hours and off-hours.
It can be easy to accidentally blend work and daily life into one ongoing thing.
Without true time off, there is no time to wind down and relax.
Do not contact employees about work on their time off.
Set boundaries in regards to sending emails (which you can always schedule to go out Monday rather than Friday night) or using their personal phone to contact them about work issues.
Whether they are on vacation, at home eating dinner or off for the weekend, protect those times so they can come back to work well-rested and ready to focus.
Promote Health and Nutrition
Offering healthy snacks, mindfulness session breaks and other daily health boosts can really make a positive influence on your employees.
Think long-term and start taking care of workers beyond the basic expectations of workers’ rights.
You can create a culture that is focused, energized and motivated from the inside out.
Set SMART Goals
Always set SMART goals for your team. These are goals that are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Realistic
- Timely
SMART goals are important because they increase clarity, enable success and caps the event.
When you specify exactly what the goal will accomplish, there is no vague guessing at what success means.
Telling your team to “stay productive” doesn’t mean anything.
When you choose a measure for success, you can determine if the attempt was completed or will need adjustment for the future due to failure.
Of course, goals should always be something your employees are able to control and are realistic due to past experience.
It isn’t fair to expect your team to somehow work a miracle just because you set a goal.
Most importantly, set timelines.
You need to know when the big push will end so that you aren’t in a perpetual state of meeting that goal.
Use checkpoints to ensure you are on track to meet the goal.
When that goal ends, celebrate success or the effort given and then reassess to form the next goal.
Lower Your Own Stress Level
If you are stressed, you are far more likely to pass it on to the rest of your team.
Take care of yourself first and you may be able to bring more mindfulness and focus into the workplace that will rub off on your team.
Leaders set the tone of the workplace.
If you are struggling with stress, you can check out our blog on how stress impacts your body, signs of stress and how to reduce your stress level.
The best thing you can do to start reducing stress is to naturally supplement your diet with nutrients that support a healthy mind.
Our Stress supplement helps your mind relax and refocus.
You will feel more energy and less fog when using this supplement.
We use nanotechnology that ensures a faster nutrient delivery than most competitors for better results and cost savings.
Try Anointed Nutrition Stress today and see how it helps you be a better team leader.
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