HR Management: Week 9

Student Blog for MGMT 453- Human Resources Management

Silent But Deadly: Stress in The Workplace


Stress in the workplace has a big impact on productivity, company culture, and employee experience. How do you manage it?


For this week’s learning materials, I took a few tests that measure my stress coping ability and impatience. It’s no secret that stress is a household experience in corporate America, if you’re not stressed you must not be doing enough. Right? My results were not what I had hoped for, I struggled to cope with high amounts of stress and unwinding, and my levels of patience (or in my case, lack thereof). Stress is a condition that can affect people chronically, and impacts not only the mid, but the body, too. Companies who make it a priority to help their employees manage stress usually see their investment return in the form of better productivity, higher employee morale, and much more.

In an article for Harvard Business Review, Natalie Peart discusses some ways companies can help buffer stress and create an inviting work environment. Here are five that I thought were the most important:


1. Build regular break times into the schedule

2. Set boundaries around time (working) outside of the office

3. Make sure the right people are in the right places

4. Look into flexible work policies

5. Deepen engagement further by instilling a sense of purpose.


Peart, Natalie. “Making Work Less Stressful and More Engaging for Your Employees.” Harvard Business Review, 5 Nov. 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/11/making-work-less-stressful-and-more-engaging-for-your-employees.

The takeaways here are that there are ways to combat stress, and it has been shown to lead to better outcomes in the office. Don’t believe me? An article from COSE states it well here, saying:  By providing stress management resources, organizations can help employees be healthier and control healthcare costs. ‘Healthy employees are often happier and more productive employees,’ says Ballog. ‘In many cases, turnover and absenteeism can also go down'” (Kevany, 2015).

For me personally, working on managing stress is a daily battle as I juggle school, leadership commitments, and working part time. However, I’ve found that creating time to be active, making a schedule, and spending quality time with friends are great for coping with stress. It will be an ever-changing process as I transition to full time jobs or have new experiences, but for now these things seem to work best for me.

How do you handle stress? Here’s the links to the tests I took for this post:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/tests/career/coping-stress-management-skills-test

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/tests/personality/type-personality-test

Citations:

Kevany, Terry. “Increase Productivity by Reducing Stress.” COSE, https://www.cose.org/en/News/Press-Releases/General/Increase-Productivity-by-Reducing-Stress.

Peart, Natalie. “Making Work Less Stressful and More Engaging for Your Employees.” Harvard Business Review, 5 Nov. 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/11/making-work-less-stressful-and-more-engaging-for-your-employees.

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