The workplace stress giant is a scourge that is according to the World Health Organization, brought by poor work design, poor work organization, unsatisfactory work conditions, poor management, and a lack of support from colleagues and supervisors.
If you want to reorganize your daily office workflow process to keep your staff from being overburdened, you are at the right place.
Here are 16 ideas from leaders in different companies around the world that will help you overcome burnout and learn to lead by example.
1. Be a role model for work-life balance.
Encourage people to use their Paid time off (PTO). Recognize and reward good work. On weekends, avoid emailing employees. Also, take steps to reduce their workload.
If they have too much on their plates on a regular basis, not just during the holiday season, it’s time to hire more people. Make the case to your superiors and be a strong advocate for your employees.
2. Set a good example
Employees are bound to feel worse if their leader is stressed.
Evaluate your feelings and take steps to reduce your own burnout. Take time for yourself by going on vacation or taking a day off to rest and relax.
Employees may doubt their ability to take time off if their boss does not do so on a regular basis. Even a few days can make a difference.
3. Provide Clarity And Priorities Alignment
When you’re committed to your job, you may feel obligated to continue doing the same tasks you’ve always done or to say yes to everything.
The reality is that leaders and their teams must establish priorities. This will have the greatest overall impact, ensuring that teams are working on the right things and managing their workloads.
4. Advise Your Team Regarding Guiding Principles In A Hybrid World
First and foremost, as a leader, remind people that your working hours do not have to coincide with their working hours.
The most important factor is not how long they are online, but rather the completed work. To get there, collaborate to set real deadlines that meet business needs, work with employees’ schedules, or eliminate lower priority items.
5. Schedule one-on-one meetings on a regular basis.
Leaders will be able to detect rising stress levels in their organizations through regular one-on-one meetings with employees.
When the amount or scope of work becomes unbalanced, leaders should assist their teams in determining which tasks can be postponed or redistributed to others with more time.
Quality time with your team never hurts, either!
6. Accept A Culture Of Adaptability
Leaders should promote a flexible culture.
Implement a flex-hours policy so that employees can work when it is convenient for them. Work output and client satisfaction should be measured in relation to hours worked.
This in the end not only fosters a supportive environment but also demonstrates to employees that you trust them to do their jobs and are committed to employee well-being and work-life balance.
7. Provide Long-Term Resources to Your Teams
Leaders must resource teams in a sustainable way to prevent long-term burnout and stress.
Setting realistic goals, funding automation, and staffing teams so that tasks are not too big to handle are all part of this.
Too many leaders make the mistake of encouraging staff members to look for balance while setting unreasonably high job expectations. Stress reduction is partially individual but mostly systemic.
8. Maintain Transparency and Assist Employees in Understanding The Big Picture
Team members are more engaged when they have a clear understanding of and connection to the work they are doing.
This level of involvement and appreciation for the larger goal will propel the company—and your team—forward.
9. Emphasize the significance of mental health
The pandemic’s challenges highlighted the importance of employees’ mental health, which can be negatively impacted by extreme stress and burnout.
Employers should recognize this and encourage employees to step back when necessary. Furthermore, employers should provide mindfulness training to managers and counseling services to employees who are struggling.
10. Make an environment that boosts your employees’ resilience.
If you truly care about your team members’ resilience, avoid questions like “How are you holding up?”
Continue to keep an eye out for early signs of burnout and make sure they get some rest. And when they do, leaders and managers should honor that time and conduct open forums where employees can talk and share best practices for handling ongoing change to avoid workplace stress.
11. Encourage Employees to Discuss Stress and Seek Help
Create a culture in which it is acceptable to talk about your stress and to seek assistance from a caring team that looks out for one another.
Respect people’s time off and make sure everybody has time off scheduled.
Ensure that the team is flexible and that the focus is on deliverables. Also, incorporate simple things like inspiration days where individuals have time to get inspired.
12. Allow Employee Performance Rather Than Managing It
Instead of managing performance, concentrate on enabling it. Determine what people’s obstacles and barriers are and work hard to eliminate them. This will not only help people deliver work and free up bandwidth, but it will also reduce psychological stress.
13. Encourage Staff to Be Happy at Work
Leaders must establish a work environment and culture in which employees can enjoy, be motivated, and be happy at work.
If decision-makers keep this clear, any obstacles could be much simpler to address. Working reasonable hours, taking breaks, and having a life outside of the office can all help to replace a stressful work environment.
14. Signal Boundary Violations
No one wants to be a tattletale, however, when it comes to leading by example, it is equally crucial to acknowledge when someone is overstepping their bounds.
You’ll agree with me when I say that office gossip and people overstepping their boundaries are amongst the highest causes of workplace stress.
Provide straightforward, just-in-time advice if someone isn’t demonstrating adaptability, creating unnecessary pressure, violating time off, and the like.
Recognizing when this occurs is part of maintaining boundaries and preventing it from happening again.
15. Determine your priorities and don’t sweat the small stuff.
High performers are inherently perfectionists; it is your job as a leader to help them see that perfect can be the enemy of good, and that most of the time, just getting something done is often preferable to getting something done perfectly.
It’s also a good idea to remind your team that it’s okay to prioritize non-critical items over the big picture.
16. Transactional Work Is Considered in a Lean Strategy
A lean strategic approach that takes account of interactional tasks and ensures that employees are capable of maintaining balance can reduce workplace stress.
The first step is to determine which initiatives are most critical.
Then, leaders should recognize the transactional tasks that occur in daily work, such as compliance, meetings, and reporting. A project management office (PMO) structure can then be formed to organize deliverables.
The Bottomline
Work-related stress is a reaction that people may have when confronted with job pressures and demands not matched to their skills and expertise and that test their ability to cope.
Stress occurs in a variety of work situations, but it is often exacerbated when employees believe they have almost no support from colleagues and superiors, and also little influence on company processes.
Pressure, challenge, and stress are frequently confused, and this is sometimes used to justify poor management practices.
Work that values extreme expectations and pressures that are not matched to workers’ expertise and skills, in which there is no chance of exercising any choice or control, as well as little support from others, is the most stressful type of work.
You can take the stress test on our website using the stress meter.
How We Reviewed this Article
Sources
Mental Health America: How can we encourage employees to use their PTO?
https://mhanational.org/how-can-we-encourage-employees-use-their-pto
Harvard Business Review – How to Manage a Hybrid Team
https://hbr.org/2020/10/how-to-manage-a-hybrid-team)
Stress at Work………
