Why Workplace Stress Is Harming Your Productivity & Your Staff

How Stress Affects the Individual

Stress can have very negative effects on individual people. Just how much stress impacts a person depends on several factors. This includes their levels of personal resilience, the coping mechanisms they can utilize, how severe the stress is, and how long the stress has been happening.

Whenever we feel challenged - taken out of our comfort zone - the body automatically initiates a survival mode called the stress response, commonly known as "fight or flight". This is an inherent and ancient human trait; a survival mechanism that allows individuals to quickly respond to danger and return to a position or feeling of safety. To this day, the stress response serves as a way to cope appropriately with negative situations. Short term stress results in heightened awareness and thinking, elevated heart rate, increased muscle tension, strength and aggression, and momentarily decreased digestive and immune activity. This is simply the body preparing for immediate and decisive action in order to mitigate the perceived threat.

However, if the stress continues for extended periods - if this heightened state continues to run without ceasing - these symptoms can become harmful. The effects of prolonged or excessive stress include, amongst others, insomnia, anger, decreased appetite, binge eating, withdrawal, obsessive thinking, anxiety, depression and even chronic health conditions such as type II diabetes and asthma.

How Stress Affects the Workplace Environment

Even a single person who is experiencing the effects of prolonged or excessive stress can contribute to the development of an underlying tension in the workplace environment. It can quickly start a chain reaction, which may affect the entire company. Employees may lose motivation for work, and they certainly won't want to stay late. They will half-heartedly do the work they once looked forward to.

What to Do About It

The workplace will always have a certain amount of change. There is nothing that can be done about that. Things like restructures, changing deadlines, employee turnover, and difficult customers are going to happen. What is within your power is to develop and implement the policies necessary to provide your staff with the skills they need to self-manage the physical and psychological effects of change.

For your staff, a great resource is stress management training. This simple training will give them the coping skills necessary to better handle any challenge comes their way.

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Are You Stuck in The Leadership Trap?

"Getting Stuck is Not a Problem. Staying Stuck is"- Alistair Smith

There is nothing more daunting than staring at a blank computer screen or blank page to write your Pulitzer Prize best-selling book with blank pages. Yet business executives just like everyone else from time-to-time experience getting stuck on ideas to help you complete a task, grow your business and experience stress, frustration and overwhelm.

"Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are." -Bernice Johnson Reagon

If you knew where it was coming from you might be able to head it off, yet it can come on suddenly and you don't know why, at least at first. Some say the experience of being stuck is the perception of limited choices. No one likes to feel stuck. In order to get unstuck, you have to step back and look at what happened before, during and after you got to where you are right now.

"Right now I'm stuck somewhere between what if, what might, what could have, and what never will and all I want to know is what actually is." - Christina Hart

Being stuck in a rut doing the same daily routines and not going outside of that can stop you from accepting opportunities because you don't know which way to go. Focusing on your stress, frustration and overwhelmed feelings can paralyze you. The problem is not just being stuck it is the fact of how you go about keeping yourself in a stuck position.

"If you are facing a new challenge or being asked to do something that you have never done before don't be afraid to step out. You have more capability than you think you do but you will never see it unless you place a demand on yourself for more." -Joyce Meyer

Being Stuck Has a Fear Component

Being stuck has the same experience as fear. This is a response to the stress, frustration and overwhelm you have that is perceived as a threat or is harmful to you. As a result you feel anxious and nervous that has you not think on the things that matter most to you.

Typically when people are stuck you don't realize that fear plays a part. You need to understand how fear allows you to be stuck without realizing it. When you struggle with fear it's either because of a decision you made or are about to make or because you don't like being criticized or judged for something you said or did. Most people don't like the latter at all.

Fear of not getting things done by a set deadline still stands. You may worry that you can't get things done on time. While fear is completely normal, it does prevent you from creating or producing anything new. Working through this issue helps you deal with it better. Sometimes the fact of doing something outside your comfort zone is fearful. When you do it a few times you get used to it be part of your routine.

What Got You Here Won't Get You There

"Fear is often our immediate response to uncertainty. There's nothing wrong with experiencing fear. They key is not to get stuck in it." -Gabrielle Bernstein

With most people using traditional ways to get unstuck you still focus on your stressful, frustrated and overwhelmed thoughts. By doing so, you keep yourself in a stuck position. This is being reactive. You panic and go into a crisis mode. This doesn't help you to move forward.

Too many leaders expect to stay the course and continue conducting business on a traditional approach. You expect to work the same way as before and get different results.

For many young executives you were promoted because of your skills, talent, problem-solving abilities. You thought it was great to sit in a top spot and delegate work to other. What you did not expect was that being an executive you also had projects you have to complete. This leads you to not work from 9-to-5, but 50 hours or more each week. This can be too overwhelming for many especially if you thought things would be very different.

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results". A new approach is probably all you need to get unstuck. (Albert Einstein)

With this Comes Self-Confidence

"Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment."-Thomas Carlyle

The most important step in building self-confidence is simply to take action. Take a few minutes and think about your being stuck. How you get unstuck has a lot to do with how resilience to work through your stuck situation with patience.

Be curious and think about the fact that when you are stuck in fear you are close up. Essentially, ask questions. Don't let anything or anyone stop you from being curious about why you got stuck. You may even find that either you caused it or it had nothing to do with you.

"The way to develop self-confidence is to do the thing you fear." -William Jennings Bryan

Work on your self-esteem as you need to build up on your self-confidence and believe in yourself more.

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Are Your Policies Killing Your Opportunities?

Back when I was in high school (or it might have been shortly after; I don't really remember, and it doesn't really matter), I got a part-time job at the Don Randall Music Store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was on my very first day that Mr. Randall-in a move that seemed almost like magic to me-taught me a great lesson.

It was the end of the day, and we had just closed the store and locked the glass front doors. There were just three of us there-myself, another employee, and Mr. Randall-and we were busy with the typical "end of the day" jobs: sweeping the floors, tallying the registers, etc. All of a sudden, I heard someone knocking at the door.

He was kind of shabby looking, and he was carrying a beat-up guitar case. I, trying to be a good, policy-following employee on my very first day, told him through the glass that we were closed. He said he just wanted to get some guitar strings. I was about to repeat that we were closed but that he could buy some guitar strings tomorrow when Mr. Randall came up behind me and asked what was going on. Shabby Guy repeated his desire to buy some strings.

Instantly, Mr. Randall unlocked the door, saying, "Let's get this young man some guitar strings."
Okay, now here's the part that blew me away. I went back to sweeping the floor, while Mr. Randall and Shabby Guy went to the guitar section of the store. About twenty minutes later, Shabby Guy leaves. Did he have new guitar strings?

You bet he did. They were attached to his brand new Fender Stratocaster guitar... which he would be playing through his brand new Fender Twin Reverb amplifier.

I looked at Mr. Randall like he was a wizard. In twenty minutes, he had turned a $5 sale into a $500 sale-from a guy whom I wouldn't have guessed had more than fifty bucks to his name. Mr. Randall looked at me and said, "Never let policy get in the way of opportunity."

Never let policy get in the way of opportunity.
That's good, don't you think?

What Mr. Randall taught me seems obvious, doesn't it? The purpose of the Don Randall Music Store was to sell musical instruments-not to close on time.

What's the purpose of your business? Do you, or any of your team members, every short-change that purpose under the guise of "following policy"? Are each of your team members crystal clear on the purpose of the organization that they work for? Are you?

A recent survey showed that only one employee in seven could name even one of their organization's most important goals.

Job #1, then, is educating your team on the organization's goals. Don Randall's goal was selling musical instruments.

Job #2 is to not let policy get in the way of achieving those goals.

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