Avoiding Employee Stress: Dealing With Adversity

As the recession continues, with little sign of relief, organizations are increasingly feeling the pain. Restructuring is the order of the day as companies are forced to trim the staff numbers, and every month brings a new round of redundancies or a reduction in hours. Perhaps profits have declined and your investors are tightening the screws, or maybe the Giant Google Panda caught you unawares, crushing your business underneath its uncaring paws.

During these tough times, telling loyal employees that they must leave, especially when you know that they have bills to pay, mouths to feed, and a mortgage to pay can be soul-destroying. The constant lay offs rapidly demotivate staff and, like a virulent disease, blackness and despair pervades your workforce, harming productivity and killing the sense of shared community. Uncertainty turns happy workforces into raging mobs, riven by infighting and decimated by a flurry of resignations as your best staff flee to more verdant pastures.

This employee stress is easily avoidable if you watch out for the signs and try to address the issue rather than merely pick at the symptoms. If your staff are fully aware of the severity of the situation, they will be very supportive and will help you in your quest for pragmatic solutions. This is the key to knowing how to manage employee stress during difficult times.

Here are a few tips for avoiding tension in the workplace, alongside the implications if you choose to hide from the issues and hope that they go away. Your workforce will look to you for guidance, expecting strong, firm leadership with clear goals, rather than half-hearted fiddling around the edges of the problem.

During a crisis, it is very easy for the management to become insular and introverted, caught up in frantically trying to devise schemes and implement a portfolio of reforms. This is a very weak and damaging approach, because your employees need strong leadership and conviction, and an awareness of the final destination as you all work towards a common goal. This isn’t the time for a ‘need to know’ attitude or hiding the sinister truth; your staff members are stakeholders in the business and they deserve to be treated as such.

Poor communication can foster an ‘Us vs Them’ attitude, creating a culture of blame that risks seeing the workforce disintegrate. Without a clear plan, laying out the ultimate aims of the organization and a realistic timetable for reorganization, you will cause untold, potentially irreversible damage. Your employees are human, and humans will naturally speculate, with a distinct tendency to take the most pessimistic outlook.

If you let this employee stress fester, without addressing the concerns of your workforce, the divisions will be deep and permanent. Often, you will find your workforce splits into two camps; those who have faith and will applaud your every decision, and those who hold genuine concerns and begin to criticize your approach.

Don’t Swamp Your Employees:

Many companies panic and start throwing out changes, running around trying to patch cracks in the wall rather than creating a logical plan to repair the entire edifice. Your staff have enough to deal with; many of them have financial concerns and are worried about where the next paycheck is coming from. The last thing that they need is a flurry of contradictory, nonsensical, irrational, and ill thought out directives flowing from the top. If you want to avoid employee stress, slow down and make reasonable plans, implementing changes gently and with delicacy.

Refusing to listen to feedback is potentially a fatal error. Your employees on the frontline have a wealth of accumulated knowledge and experience, and ignoring their concerns because you think that you know better is foolish and shortsighted. Their insight added to your leadership skills can bring everybody on board and help you to navigate your way through the morass.

Scapegoating is particularly common in workforce as employees start blaming each other for the difficulties. Members of staff whose foibles are normally tolerated may become victims of witch-hunts, as pitchfork wielding mobs descend, tearing apart everything in their way as they drag them to the ducking pond for righteous judgment. If you are not careful, the ‘Know-It-Alls’ and the ‘Told-You-So’s’ will become more vocal, reveling in their new role of Witchfinder General.

Create Work Harmony by Avoiding Favoritism:

At times like these, it is tempting to start developing favorites, looking towards the staff who will never question your decisions or rock the boat, whatever you do wrong. Perhaps you feature them as paragons of virtue, despite their character flaws, simply because they can quote the rules and regulations to the letter. Alternatively, you might use their work as an example, even if there are other hardworking members of staff with far more talent, knowledge, and ability.

Loyal staff, who consistently produced great work over the years, suddenly find their work ethic questioned and you, seemingly randomly, actively look for mistakes and flaws, again fostering these fatal divisions. Consistency is crucial and, if you do need to question the work quality of staff, at least try to explain the rationale and reasoning behind your criticisms. People simply cannot work if their every contribution is picked apart and dissected, and you encourage employee stress to grow, unabated.

Too Much Too Quickly

The temptation with restructuring is to try to do too much too quickly, trying to force change on an already overworked staff. This may have a positive effect at first, but it is a very short-term solution and you will eventually end up with a workforce feeling fatigued and suffering from burnout.

Placing unreasonable timescales and demands on your employees is counterproductive and it will seriously harm the long-term growth and development of your business. Productivity will decline, absenteeism will rise, and your most talented staff will leave as they seek to flee the growing chaos. 

Ultimately, failure to address genuine concerns and leaving your employees groping in the toxic, stifling darkness is sheer recklessness. Many of your most productive members of staff will leave, simply because they know that their skills and talents are in demand. Your competitors will be absolutely delighted that you have been careless enough to drive your best employees away. Adding to the problem, other talented members of your team will suffer such demotivation that they will stop working, sending the company into a tailspin.

Just when you need your team to pull together and pull you out of a hole, your shortsighted policies and general cluelessness have the opposite effect. If you are serious about stopping employee stress and tension in the workplace from affecting your workforce, try to avoid making simple mistakes that can snowball into chaos and demotivated employees.