As a manager, one of your jobs is to ensure that your team is healthy and well. It’s common for managers to forget about stress, however. Stress has become so normalised over the last few decades that we have forgotten how bad it is for overall health. Seeing as work is where a lot of this stress originates, it’s important that you are taking measures to combat this! In this article, we’re going to be taking a look at some of the top tips that we can come up with to reduce stress in your team, so keep reading if you are interested in finding out more.
Have an open-door policy
One of the things that you should be doing is having an open-door policy in your business. Your door should be open to the people who work for you, ensuring that they have access to the resources and support that they might need going forward. This is not to say that, as the manager, you do not have your own things to do because we know that you do, but your team needs to know that you are there for them.
Having an open-door policy will not interrupt your work in the way that some managers seem to think it will. In fact, it will improve your relationship with your employees, and, therefore, is more likely to drive them to work harder but without the pressure. They will be less stressed knowing that you are on their side when they need you.
Ask employees what they need
It’s also important to ask the team what they need. This might be what they need from you as their manager, or it might be what they need in general to make their job easier to do. Of course, you might not be able to provide everything that they need, but you can give it a good go, which is all they can ask of you. If your team members can see that you are doing your best to make their lives better and easier, then they are less likely to be balls of stress floating around the office.
A lot of stress comes from not feeling supported, so make sure you do everything you can to provide enough support.
Offer compassion and understanding
There will be times when things are going on outside of work that are causing your team members to be stressed. While there is nothing you can do about their personal life, you can offer compassion and understanding where possible, providing them with all the appropriate support they need at work. For example, if someone is consistently coming in five minutes late because of childcare issues, be understanding here. It’s not like they are coming in hours late, and as long as they are doing their job to the best of their ability, what’s the problem?
Being compassionate and understanding can help to massively reduce the stress levels that your team members experience. Oftentimes, you will find that people are stressed about their boss is response to them making mistakes or having issues, so you need to eliminate this by offering compassion and understanding when things don’t go 100% right.
Hire Some Outside Help
The final thing that we’re going to recommend is that you hire some outside help. This is another way to offer support to your team, as the help that you are offering is not attached to the business itself, meaning that they may feel able to be more open about the cause of their stress. If you look into workplace stress management support, you will find companies that are able to offer their services.
If stress is hurting the business overall, this doesn’t have to be something that you deal with alone. You can take it to your manager, speak about what kind of impact it’s having on your team, and see if this is the case across the board. If it is, then calling in outside help may be the best way forward.
There you go, then! These are some of the things that managers should be doing if you want to reduce stress in your team. There is absolutely no need for your team to be full of stress, and oftentimes, you will find that it comes down to you! So, make some changes as soon as you can, and start trying to reduce your team’s stress levels ASAP.
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