Workplace Stress Management – Communication and Skills

What else can companies do to help?

Perhaps you may identify some training needs that will help your staff be less stressed.

Maybe they are not proficient with the necessary IT user skills, or have somehow not been offered appropriate training on bespoke company software.




Perhaps a time management course would help some of your team manage their workload better. We have covered this on this site. You might want to revisit it here.

Time Management

Or perhaps they need some change management skills. In my experience, the fear of the unknown and lack of control causes a lot of stress. Plus, many people are comforted when they realise that it is normal for the situation to deteriorate before it improves, this is almost inevitable in any significant change

There are four modules in this change management course. You may want to reread them here.

Change Management

Or maybe your team would benefit from some advice on how to delegate, and again you can reread those modules here.

Delegation

Keep them in the loop

It is well documented that one of the main causes of stress is lack of control, fear of the unknown, the inability to manage what happens to you.

For example, in a redundancy situation, while it is stressful for the management who have to make difficult decisions about how many redundancies should be made, who should go, how to organise the process, and the package, it is significantly more stressful for the employees who have no control over the process at all.

This is why, in any change management programme, communication is an important focus.

Cascade information down

I have seen this done really well, starting with a full day management conference for all senior managers across the company, though it was a national company. There were more than 30,000 staff nationally, with a senior management team 800 strong.

Each of these managers was given literature, and information, and expected to cascade down the information to their teams next day

FAQs were provided, and each manager took questions from their staff. If they could not answer the question, they had been told where to direct the question. They received a response promptly to pass on to their team.

Regular meetings were held over the following months, and everyone was kept in the loop, knowing what to expect, as far as possible.

No system is perfect, but this type of approach goes a long way to helping people deal with a potentially stressful situation.

New skills

A huge re-skilling programme was entered into, with all senior managers undergoing change management training and team building exercises.
Everyone was made familiar with new systems and processes through companywide training sessions.

It is quite a task to get 30,000 people pulling in the same direction in a huge multibillion pound company. This was a very good effort, I thought