Managing Workplace Stress

It is normal to experience some workplace stress, however if this stress becomes excessive it can interfere with your productivity and your health – emotional and physical. Your ability to cope with this stress can be the difference between success and failure in your career.

Finding strategies to manage workplace stress is not necessarily about making huge changes but focusing on the thing that’s within your control – you.

There are many different ways you can reduce your stress levels in the workplace.

These start with:

• Making a commitment to improving your physical and emotional health.
• Staying away from people or habits, when possible, that leave you feeling negative or stressed.
• Learn communication skills to improve your relationship with colleagues and management.

When you feel overwhelmed at work you can easily become withdrawn, irritable and insecure. This decreases your productivity and makes you less effective at your job. It can also make you feel like your job is less rewarding. When stress begins to interfere with your ability to do your job, it’s time to do something to remedy it. Begin by making sure that you’re looking after yourself. When your own needs are taken care of you are more capable of dealing with stress.

Try organising and prioritising your work. This can help you to reduce your stress by helping you to feel as though you’re in control.

Here are a few simple tips for time management:

• Don’t spread yourself too thin. Avoid scheduling meetings back to back or trying to get everything done in one day. If you have too many things to be done, drop the tasks that aren’t a priority to the bottom of the list.
• Don’t rush. Leaving 10 minutes earlier can mean the difference between running around madly and being able to take your time. Being late or rushing to be on time will only add to your stress levels.
• Factor breaks into your schedule. Taking a few short break throughout the day will help you to relax and de-stress. Have your lunch outside or at least away from your desk.

You can also gain a large amount of self-control by understanding and practising emotional intelligence. This is the ability to manage your emotions and use them in positive and productive ways.

Emotional intelligence in the workplace is composed of four major elements:

• Self-management, controlling your emotions and behaviour to adapt to changing circumstances.
• Self-Awareness, recognising your emotions and their impact.
• Social Awareness, the ability to understand and react to others emotions.
• Relationship Management, the ability to connect to others and manage conflict.

How to be a Good Manager

There is no definitive technique for being a great manager, you have to walk a fine line between constructive criticism and praise. While there are no one size fits all approaches to management, there are a few strategies to help you get the best from your employees.

• Listen more. Try to avoid talking at your employees at review time. You can often gain all the information you need by saying something open ended and listening to what your employee has to say.
• Learn your team’s strengths and weaknesses and work with them. This way you are getting the best of your employees and not wasting time having one employee fulfil a task that would take a different person half the time.
• Try to manage your team as a whole and not just as separate individuals. As a manager you are responsible for the output of the entire team as a whole. Try to team staff members with complementary skills to provide learning opportunities.
• Be Inspiring. Try and distinguish your employee’s exceptional talents and develop them further. Find work opportunities that will challenge them. Make sure that your employees talents are recognised and celebrated. This reinforces performance and makes your employees strive to perform well in the future.
• Give regular feedback. Tell your staff how they are doing at the time and not just at their scheduled 6 monthly performance review. Help your staff to realise that their efforts help the overall success of the company. This will help them to feel connected to the organisation and encourage engagement. 
• Don’t let work friendships alter your managing abilities. As a manager you are assuming responsibility for a group of people and naturally you want them to like you. It is all well and good to be friendly with your team ,  just make sure that you are still able deliver criticism or discipline when it is needed
• Be present. Being in management can keep you very busy. You are often rushing from one place to another. Be wary to not let being busy take over from the day to day management of your staff. As a manager you need to make yourself available to your staff to offer them guidance and give them the opportunity to ask questions when they need to.
• Make an effort to know the basic roles and responsibilities of all your team members. It is very hard to provide guidance and leadership if you are not exactly sure of what your staff are meant to be doing in the first place. If you have to ask your team about their basic functions it is very like that they will second guess the decisions you make.

How our Emotional State Affects our Employees

Research is now discovering that emotions are capable of affecting memory, perception and cognition. All of these things can influence how an employee performs at work.

When people are influenced by the moods of others, especially those in managerial positions, it can impact their behaviour at work. This is called “emotional contagion”. How we feel can spill out and infect other people, essentially making us walking mood inductors.

We even have cells in our bodies called mirror neurons which allow us to be in touch with how other people are feeling by simply observing them. Neuroscientists have recently discovered that empathy is driven by these mirror neurons which are located in the frontal cortex of your brain. Mirror neurons fire in the same way whether you're watching someone do something or you are actually doing that same thing yourself.

At work, it is often the leader’s responsibility to set the mood for the rest of the team in the workplace. The emotions people bring to work are as important as their cognitive skills, and especially so for leaders. If you are a leader, consider that managing your moods is one of your chief responsibilities.

A good way to look at it is, your mood, positive or negative, will remain in a room long after you have left it and the mood you generate is directly related to how you make people feel.
There has been little research done on the ramifications of group emotions. If you consider the effects of emotional contagion, it is easy to assume that within the workplace groups are reflecting the influence of key emotional people within their team. Usually the leaders.

The key to stopping this emotional contagion is awareness, however often another person’s negative mood affects you unconsciously. If you realise that someone else’s bad mood is affecting you, you can control it. For this reason, making people, especially managers, aware of emotional contagion is vital. It is important to understand that when employees are exposed to the moods of leaders who are giving off feelings of anger or hostility, it can have toxic effects on their performance.

The same goes for feelings of confidence and enthusiasm. This is why it is so important for leaders to understand that they can utilise mood contagion to create a positive emotional climate for their employees.

When managers learn to control their own emotions and know the emotional triggers of their team, they can manipulate the atmosphere of their workplace.