Soft Skiils

Managing stress at the workplace

There is no definite tactic for battling stress, it’s a dynamic strategy that depends on the scenario at hand, says Rajkumar D

As markets become more and more competitive and deadlines become tougher, with inflation is on the rise, one cannot help getting caught up in the whirlpool of the work environment. During all this, there is an unwanted visitor called ‘stress’ that drops in.

Stress is known to be one of the major reasons for a drop in performance for many star players in the company. The unfortunate thing about stress is that there is no set process in place that we can set up to identify or handle stress. This is for the simple reason that people react very differently to every scenario. One man’s comfort zone might turn out to be very stressful to another person. Sometimes people deal and react to stressful scenarios in very unpredictable ways. This unfortunately hampers any HR department from setting up a well-defined process. However, there are signs which indicate if an employee is stressed out, and there are certain standard procedures one can follow to help.

The first signs

The first sign of stress for anyone is—a drop in performance. An employee who till yesterday was always up to the mark, suddenly is unable to meet deadlines, seems bored and worried, and go about their work with no enthusiasm or interest. They tend not to contribute to the thought process of the company and get angered by simple problems. Decision-making takes a major toll when a person is stressed. They tend to make incorrect, inappropriate and inefficient decisions. They find the easy way out of problems rather than the best way out. It is very rare that those two tracks ever meet.

Identifying stress

Identifying stress is more the job of the immediate manager than that of personnel in HR. The reason is simple—the manager is the one person who is expected to know his team inside-out as he/she interacts with them on a daily basis. He is expected to understand the strengths and weaknesses of his team and delegates work accordingly. The manager is the one person who can delegate work efficiently and help reduce stress at least from the point of work. While stress can never be eliminated, it can be kept under control. A manager is expected to know when an employee is over-burdened with work and needs somebody to share the burden. At the same time the manager must not take the entire burden of work on his shoulders but must instead help the employee find efficient and proper ways to solve the issue themselves. The simple gesture of giving a helping hand goes a long way in not only avoiding a stressful work environment, but also is great for building trust with a manager and his team.

There are certain scenarios where one can predict or expect stressful environments and is sometimes rendered helpless in avoiding such environments. For example, the finance and accounts team will always be under stress at the end of every quarter, more so at the end of the financial year. The team supporting customers based in the US tend to be under more stress during the night shift than in the evening shift as call flow would go up. A technical team would be under stress when there is a major deployment going on after months of research and development. In such situations, there is rarely anything one can really do, as these are expected stress scenarios. The maximum one can do is prioritize responsibilities and work smartly.

Stress busters

There can be occasional ‘stress buster’ events, which the HR department can hold from time to time to lighten the mood. Team outings, family get-togethers, parties, etc., help lighten the mood. But these aren’t the only solution. The true issues of stress can be taken care of only when the employee is well looked after. Medical benefits, paternity leave for fathers, support to family when the employee is offshore, psychological assistance for issues that may not be tackled by managers or team leads, all are little initiatives that help an employee concentrate only on work. Such initiatives assure that any stress to the employee is only work-related and is not amplified by other external worries.

To conclude, here are some simple steps which any organization can follow to reduce stress among employees. We can’t remove it completely, but we can try to alleviate it.

• Understand strengths and weaknesses of employees before assigning roles and responsibilities.
• Give adequate breaks between work, to unwind.
• Provide assistance such as an Employee Counseling Service, health and other benefits to help employees and their families.
• Learn to predict stressful situations and gear up the teams.
• Never overburden an employee with work to a level where it is all that they do.

Rajkumar D is Senior Manager-HR at Microland, a Bangalore-based IT infrastructure management company