Employee Stress Management in Businesses
Stress is the physical or mental physiological response of people when they adapt to stimuli caused by their surroundings, and it may have a positive or negative impact on their mental and physical health. The loss of business productivity due to frequent absenteeism, absent-mindedness, and decreased creativity caused by employee stress exceeds $150 billion annually in the United States alone.
In order to prevent and reduce the negative impact of stress on individual employees and organizations, and to bring its positive effects into play, many business managers have begun to pay attention to the issue of employee stress management. The implementation of appropriate stress management in enterprises can effectively reduce the excessive psychological pressure of employees and maintain moderate and optimal pressure, thus enabling employees to improve work efficiency, and thus improve the performance of the entire organization and increase profits.
The main body of stress management is the individual employee and the human resources authority. Stress first acts on the individual employee, and employees with different personalities will react differently to the same stress. Related research has proved this. Some employees are easily frustrated, anxious and irritable after encountering pressure, and they can't extricate themselves for a long time. Some employees are able to face stress correctly, and although they may also experience discomfort, they are able to adjust their emotions quickly. This shows that different personalities have different ability to regulate and adapt to stress. The main body of stress management also includes the enterprise human resources department or enterprise managers, in the current era of human-centered management, managers have the responsibility to help employees to control their own pressure, so that employees can work up a happy mood, work performance can also be the highest, to achieve a "win-win" effect of personnel.
Causes or sources
In order to effectively manage stress, it is necessary for managers to accurately identify the causes of employee stress, so as to take positive and targeted measures.
The causes or sources of stress can be broadly categorized into three areas: work stress, family stress, and life stress.
1) Work stress. Work stress is the stress that arises at work. Its origin may have a variety of circumstances. Such as the work environment (including the physical environment of the workplace and the organizational environment, etc.), the allocation of work tasks, the degree of difficulty, the work required to complete the length of the time limit, the impact of interpersonal relationships between employees, the work of the new position changes, etc., these may be triggered by the work of the employee stress triggers. Work pressure should be the focus of human resources managers.
2) Family pressure and social pressure. Every employee has their own personal family life, family life is beautiful and harmonious to employees have a great impact. These family pressures may come from parents, spouses, children and relatives.
There are also some pressures from social aspects. Including the social macro-environment (such as the economic environment, industry conditions, job market, etc.) and the impact of the micro-environment around the employee. Such as the IT industry workplace requirements to master the expertise of the ever-changing, competitive pressure in the workplace, the elimination rate of professionals is high, at this time it is a great social pressure on IT employees. Employees in the social class of the status of the high and low, income status also constitute social pressure. Such as when the employee's own income status compared with other social classes, or with other practitioners in the same industry compared to the lower, he can also produce pressure.
Despite these family pressure and social pressure and work has nothing to do, but as a business manager should also pay attention to, and try to minimize the interference of the staff, only so that employees can devote themselves to their work.
Pressure channeling
In the specific management of the above pressure, each different personality employees and the source of pressure to do a specific and comprehensive analysis. Adjustment ability and adapt to the pressure of strong employees, their psychological ability to withstand, they can be very good at handling and alleviating stress. To the psychological adaptability of weak employees encounter pressure, may not be able to timely control pressure, then business managers need to be more to help care for such employees.
Stress management can be divided into catharsis, counseling, guidance in three ways.
Catharsis as a way of releasing pressure, the effect should be good. Catharsis can be done in a variety of ways, for example, it can be done by yelling in a place where no one is around, or by strenuous exercise or singing. Some studies have shown that sports, housework, etc. are very beneficial in reducing stress.
Counseling is to talk to professional psychologists or friends and family about the depression and tension in your heart. Talking to your friends or parents is something that almost everyone has experienced. In fact, regardless of whether the person being talked to can solve their own problems, the talk itself is a good way to adjust the pressure. The best way is to communicate with a professional for psychological counseling. Psychological counseling is a professional counseling staff through language, text and other media to communicate with employees to adjust the employee's psychological or emotional process. Through psychological counseling can help employees in the treatment of stress in the views, feelings, emotions and other aspects of change, to solve their psychological problems, so as to adjust the mind, can correctly face and deal with stress, to maintain physical and mental health, improve work efficiency and quality of life.
Guidance is a way for managers or others to help employees change their mindset and behavior, so that they can correctly deal with stress. Such as redefining the development goals, cultivating a variety of hobbies and interests of employees are good guidance methods. Employees to establish the correct and appropriate goals, through their own efforts to achieve this goal, the related pressure will naturally disappear. And if employees have colorful hobby activities, when it comes to pressure can easily divert attention to hobbies, from which to cultivate sentiment, protection of physical and mental health, the mind will also be calm, the pressure will naturally be reduced until it disappears.
Stress management methods
Business leaders and human resource managers should be fully concerned about, pay attention to, investigate, and analyze the stressors and types of stress experienced by their employees, and formulate and implement a variety of stress-reduction plans at the organizational level to effectively manage and reduce employee stress.
Good working environment and conditions
Reduce or eliminate the pressure brought by poor working conditions.
First of all, leaders or managers seek to create a highly efficient work environment and strictly control disturbances. Such as attention to noise, light, comfort, cleanliness, decoration, etc., to provide employees with a pleasant workspace, which is conducive to achieving the staff and the work environment, improve the staff's sense of security and comfort, and reduce stress.
Second, to ensure that employees have good tools and equipment to do a good job. For example, timely update of obsolete computers, photocopiers, fax machines and so on.
Encouragement of employees in corporate culture
Encourage and help employees to improve their mental health care ability from the corporate cultural atmosphere, learn to relieve stress and self-relaxation.
Enterprises provide employees with information and knowledge on stress management. Enterprises can order journals and magazines about maintaining mental health and hygiene for employees to read for free. This can also reflect the real concern of the enterprise for the growth and health of employees, so that employees feel care and respect, which will also become an effective means of incentives to stimulate employees to improve performance and thus improve the performance of the organization as a whole.
Enterprises can open publicity columns to popularize employees' mental health knowledge, and enterprises with the conditions can also open courses on stress management or regularly invite experts to give lectures and reports. Employees can be informed of the serious consequences of stress, the cost (such as disease, death at work, accidents, injuries, medical expenses, productivity decline and potential loss of income, etc.); the early warning signs of stress (physiological symptoms, emotional symptoms, behavioral symptoms, mental symptoms); the pressure of the self-adjustment methods (such as healthy recipes, regular exercise, learning to relax and sleep well, the development of personal hobbies and interests, etc.). ...... allows employees to build a dam of "psychological immunity" to enhance the psychological "anti-shock" ability.
Provide health care or health programs
Provide health care or health programs to employees to encourage employees to develop a good, healthy lifestyle. For example, some companies have established a special health room to provide employees with a variety of exercise, relaxation equipment, allowing employees to use free of charge, there is a full-time health instructor to supervise the exercise program and activities, the United States, some famous companies also have fitness habits of people issued funds to encourage fitness. Through fitness, exercise not only to maintain the physical health of employees (which is the basis of mental health), but also can make the employee's pressure to a large extent to be released and catharsis.
Enterprises can hire senior professionals as psychological counselors, free of charge to the employees under pressure to provide psychological counseling, so that employees to reach a **** knowledge: "physical discomfort, looking for internal and external surgeons, psychological discomfort, looking for a psychiatrist". Psychological counseling for employees to provide spiritual support and psychological counseling to help improve their social adaptability, relieve psychological pressure, maintain mental health is a very effective scientific method.
Strengthening process management
Organizational systems and procedures to help reduce employee stress and strengthen process management.
In human resources recruitment: pay attention to identifying the characteristics of human resources, selecting human resources that match the requirements of the job (personality requirements, ability requirements, and other aspects), and strive to avoid the phenomenon of great psychological pressure after taking up the job because of inability to perform the job.
Human resource allocation: strive for the best configuration of people and things, and clearly define the role of employees in the post, responsibilities, tasks. It can reduce the psychological pressure caused by role ambiguity and role conflict.
In human resources training: first, employees can be trained to improve their skills in handling work (such as writing official documents or reports, work statements, new skills, etc.), so that they can work more comfortably and reduce stress; second, employees can be trained in time management (according to the urgency and importance of each task to distinguish between the priorities, planned time), eliminating the source of time pressure; third, employees can be trained in Thirdly, employees can be trained in communication skills to eliminate interpersonal stressors, and so on.
Career planning: to help employees improve thinking, discard unrealistic expectations of too high a goal, and establish a realistic and objective SMART-style development goals: S-specific (specific, suitable for their own), M-measurble (measurable), A-achievable (achievable), R-realistic (realistic), A-measurable (measurable), A-achievable (measurable), R-realistic (realistic), R-realistic (realistic), R-realistic (realistic), R-realistic (realistic), R-realistic (realistic), R-realistic (realistic), and R-realistic (realistic). (practical), T - time-based.
Out of the misunderstanding of stress management, correct cognition of stress
Psychological research shows that stress is a neutral and objective existence, itself does not harm people, what harms people is our cognition and attitude towards stress. Very often, because of cognitive bias, managers of stress management will go into the wrong zone. There are three common misperceptions of stress.
The first misunderstanding is too much worry and too much unnecessary pressure. According to psychologists, research has found that 40% of the events that cause stress will never happen, such as the end of the world; 30% of the worries are the result of decisions made in the past, which can not be changed; 12% of the criticism made by others because of rushing to low self-esteem; 10% of the worries are related to health, and the more you worry about it, the worse it will be; and only 8% of the worries are justified.
The second misconception is that minor stresses that don't have an impactful negative effect won't harm you. The truth is that even subtle stresses can harm a person over time if they are enveloped in persistent stress for a long period of time.
The third misconception is that all stress must be eliminated. This misunderstanding manifests itself in two ways. First, as mentioned earlier, not all stress can be eliminated, only some of it can be eliminated. Secondly, not all stress is bad. Stress is a double-edged sword with both negative and positive aspects. Moderate stress can make us more alert to our surroundings, can help us deepen our understanding of ourselves, help us set more realistic goals, and give us a greater sense of self-confidence and accomplishment.
Controlling the source of stress and preventing it from the root
Most of the popular methods of stress management wait until the stress has developed to a certain level and symptoms have appeared in the psychological, physiological, and behavioral aspects before they start to take measures to regulate it. In fact, by controlling the sources of stress in a rational way, our managers can effectively prevent stress from its root causes.
As mentioned earlier, some of the stress that managers feel can be eliminated by controlling the sources of stress. For example, if a manager learns that employee morale is low because of unfair training opportunities, he or she can increase the number of training opportunities or use voting to distribute them, thereby improving employee morale and reducing the stress caused by the organizational climate. Stress caused by poor planning, for example, can be ameliorated through better time management.
Effective use of resources, a reasonable decomposition of stress
Managers for stress management, usually not alone, he led the team can be used as a resource. The management position is the hub of many work pressure distribution, pressure from higher management and the outside world is applied to the manager here, part of it will be digested by the manager, and the other part will be transmitted down to the subordinates there. Different managers will have different proportions of stress digestion and transmission.
Some managers passively accept pressure from their superiors and the outside world, and then no longer pass it downward, but keep all the pressure in the hands of the hands of their own digestion, such as the subordinates are not assured of everything to do, everything is a personal leader. Some managers are from the superiors and outside pressure without filtering, all passed to the subordinates, such as the subordinates do not take into account the digestive capacity, a brain to push the task to the subordinates. These two ways of passing are very inappropriate, the former approach will make themselves exhausted, heavy pressure, things may not do the best; the latter approach seems to have no pressure left to themselves, but when subordinates can not withstand, work efficiency is greatly reduced, will result in a backlash. The correct approach is to fully consider their own and subordinate pressure capacity, reasonable and appropriate to pass the pressure, so that subordinates known as their own resources to reduce pressure.
Establishing a good support system
Confessing is a cheap and effective way to reduce stress, the object of confiding can be leadership, colleagues, friends, family members ...... but managers are limited to a number of inconvenient to reach the reason, confiding in the object of the general staff can not be as selective. Stress management experts have found that among all the people who have a relationship with the manager, there are two people who are the most important stress reduction support resources for people in the workplace, i.e., direct superiors and their spouses, superiors can help them control the stressor, and their spouses can give them emotional understanding and appeasement.
Therefore, it is very important for managers to establish their own support system effectively and win the support of their direct superiors and spouses to reduce stress.
Organizing and implementing employee assistance programs to help managers manage stress
Some domestic companies have begun to try to import a program called Employee Assistance Program (EAP) as a holistic solution to help employees deal with occupational mental health issues, including stress. In companies that have implemented EAP, managers can utilize this mental welfare to effectively implement stress management for themselves. Domestic successful implementation of EAP enterprise experience shows that the EAP in the systematic diagnosis of work stress, targeted intervention, effective prevention and other aspects of the show a strong force, the managers of psychological stress management has a significant effect.
Manager self-stress techniques
Meditation relaxation If managers feel more pressure, then it may be worthwhile to take advantage of the time between breaks every day to do 10 minutes of meditation relaxation. Prepare a soothing music beforehand, if with the relaxation guide language is best, to a comfortable position, with the music from the fingertips to start relaxing every part of their body. You don't need to focus too much on the technique during the meditation, but more on the experience of relaxation. Every day adhere to 10 minutes, after two weeks you can feel the effect.
Breathing to reduce stress Managers in the feeling of stress, can be adjusted through the breathing to reduce stress. 5 minutes of deep breathing can make their own wildly beating heart slow down, can let the agitation of the mood to calm down, can make their own stress and twitching muscles to restore calm ...... deep breathing and then go to deal with the work, so that the pressure relief down, so that the pressure of the work, so that the work of the work of the work of the work of the work of the work of the work of the people. work, so that the pressure relief down, the ideas have become clearer, perhaps there will be unexpected ways to deal with it.
Sweating to reduce pressure Some managers will choose to sweat in the gym to relieve pressure, which is a good way to reduce pressure. Of course, managers can also choose the weekend time to go to the countryside climbing mountains, in nature to get relaxed.
Exercise to reduce stress The coordination of static and dynamic, relaxation and proper exercise is conducive to eliminating fatigue, stimulate vitality, regulate brain function, and can play a role in exercising, eliminating stress, stimulating vitality, and awakening the role of the brain. Applicable sports include swimming, aerobic jogging, jumping rope, skipping, walking, playing table tennis and so on. Arrange about half an hour of exercise every day, you can easily reduce stress.
In addition, relaxation training, yoga, meditation, hypnosis, imagination and other ways to play a role in reducing the reaction caused by stress.