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When you feel overwhelmed at work you can easily become withdrawn, irritable and insecure.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.

Leadership Development

A great leader can motivate and inspire employees by making them feel as though they are working alongside management and not for them. Poor leadership can have as great an impact on the organization’s success or failure as a recession.

Ongoing development for leaders helps companies. Businesses that invest in leadership development enjoy distinct advantages. These advantages include:

• Improved bench strength
• Improved employee retention
• Improved bottom-line performance
• Improved ability to attract talent
• Solving problems earlier and at lower levels
• Increased organizational agility
• Improved business sustainability
• Greater market value over time
• Development of leader, team, and organization competencies
• Ability to outperform the competition with increased market share, revenue, profitability, and rising stock prices
• Sustained performance
• Distributed leadership at all levels

While it is common for companies to measure engagement levels within employees, top companies are now paying particular attention to engaging leaders and employees with strong leadership potential. They are starting to look at what actions and behaviours demonstrated by leaders create engagement within their workplace. The idea being to then replicate it and drive engagement in their company.

In top companies leaders are being tasked with fostering organisational talent within their company, this contradicts the attitude of many other organisations. Effective leadership development produces leaders who can coach, mentor, and develop other leaders in the organization, providing a steady stream of leaders at all levels.

Leadership development can no longer focus solely on the senior team. Leaders must be developed at all levels throughout the organization to ensure an organization’s
success.

Although it’s typical to evaluate leaders on their past performance, top companies are assessing leaders on their potential more frequently and thoroughly. These companies are using personality profiling to ensure a perfect fit for an organisation instead of simply assessing their skills.

One of the greatest benefits of training employees and leadership development is that it can discover diamonds in the rough among your workforce. Often some of the best leaders are in fact already working for you bur have not had the opportunity to develop or display their skills.


Regular leadership development can create a culture of lifelong learning among your employees. No matter what business you are in there is always something your employees can learn that will benefit your business.


When employees and management obtain significant and effective relevant training and work together with mutual respect, everybody benefits from it the end result is increased productivity.

By developing leaders in this way, the main measure of success is organisational performance as opposed to divisional performance.


New Year’s Resolutions to make your Workplace Happier

It is the beginning of a new year and generally the time you start making a list of resolutions.

Essentially most resolutions revolve around living a happier life and having more success in the workplace.

This year instead of making the same negative resolutions about taming bad habits, this year simply make your resolution to obtain workplace happiness by trying to focus on the positives.

1. Be mindful. There is significant evidence that a few minutes of mindfulness, or simple meditation, throughout the work day can give you substantial health and happiness benefits.
2. Use your strengths. It makes sense that your happiest when you align your work with your strengths and personality. 
3. Learn to be optimistic. Optimism is actually something that can be learned if you’re not a naturally optimistic person. Start by challenging your own negative thoughts. When a setback occurs try to look at it in perspective and see that it is not the end of the world. Essentially optimists see every setback as temporary.
4. Have a little fun. It is totally acceptable to have a bit of fun and a laugh at work. It will make your work life more enjoyable and even encourages team building and promotes healthy work relationships.
5. Get on the move. If you work behind a computer or in an office where you are mostly sitting down all day, take the time to have a walk around the office every few hours. Eat your lunch in the sunshine when possible. It will help you concentrate better and help you to feel refreshed.
6. Be your own cheerleader. If your boss doesn’t praise your work every day, don’t take it personally, it’s very likely they have other things on their mind. Try and take satisfaction from knowing that you have done a job well.
7. Be nice. Talk to the people you work with about things other than work.  It doesn’t cost you anything to be pleasant and you will find your work life more meaningful if you can build relationships with your colleagues.
8. Be resilient. Learn to bounce back from a setback. As with resolution number 3 , being able to see a setback as temporary will be an invaluable quality and you will be able to handle just about anything.
9. Be Grateful. People who show thankfulness and express gratitude to others often have a higher appreciation for the good things in life and experience higher levels of wellbeing than those who do not.
10. Avoid gossip. Avoid workplace gossip at all costs. If someone in your workplace try’s to engage in gossip with you, make an excuse and walk away. Gossip is negative and harmful and does not truly make anyone feel good about themselves.

Don't trade candidate experience for recruitment efficiency

Holding your interviews by video may appear to improve the efficiency of the recruitment process, but in fact most candidates prefer more face to face contact.

The majority of candidates would rather have an in person or telephone interview to a video interview, according to research from ManpowerGroup Solutions.

Video interviews may be more efficient and time savvy but employers must be careful to not make the candidate feel uncomfortable. Research has revealed that job applicants interviewed through video conferencing come across as less likable, while those doing the hiring are viewed as less competent.

In the last 12 – 18 months video interviewing has become more common but realistically it should only be used when absolutely necessary and other options are not available, it should not be the means to an end.

Video recruiting can be useful at the beginning of the recruitment process when screening candidates but as the recruitment process progresses you should not underestimate the value of sitting with a person face to face and having a conversation with them.

In some respects, by trying to speed up the hiring process you may actually be reducing the quality of the candidates.

The research carried out by the ManpowerGroup also reveals how much the recruiter’s personality in an in-person interview influences the outcome of the hiring process.

Candidates that cannot relate to an interviewer may look elsewhere or accept an offer from a competing organisation.

A recruiter’s personality should portray the company brand, culture and values. They are the first impression a candidate gets of a company or organisation and this initial contact is absolutely crucial for a candidate to form their own opinion about whether or not they would like to work there.

Employers should utilise recruitment technology that suits their intended talent pool, tailoring their hiring approach to candidate profiles.

It is important not to view the interviewing process as a transaction. At the end of the day you are hiring a person whom you wish to embody your brand, so you must try and engage them and make them feel connected – not part of a transaction.

If your hiring someone to fill a position that may involve interacting remotely with clients or team members a video interview may give you some insight into how well a candidate may perform when they are needed to conduct a video conference.

Tips for Implementing a Performance Management System

The basic theory behind a performance management strategy is that if employees know what is expected of them, they are more likely to excel at their jobs. This is also a vital aspect of employee engagement.

By implementing a system like this you will see improved individual performance, greater employee engagement and overall better organisational performance.

Here are some keys steps to implementing a successful performance management system.

1. Clarify Objectives

An important first step is identifying some major objectives for the program and refining the need for a performance management system. What should be included within the system? You can choose to get input from your employees when trying to define the parameters of your performance management system or you can delegate it to your HR department. A good place to start is to use the definition of improving performance and satisfaction.

Some helpful things to include in a performance management system are:

• A clear company vision
• Documented and communicated core competencies
• Formal and Informal rewards which are seen as consistent and fair

2. Support of Your Managers

Once your objectives have been identified along with your expected business outcomes, you have to ensure that your managers are on board. The agreement of the senior management team is needed before any implementation steps are taken. Many systems fail because they are not seen to be included in a managers basic day to day responsibilities. Senior Managers must be seen to be actively supporting the process.

When training your managers in the implementation of a performance management system it is important that they understand:

• How much time is required to implement the system and maintain it on an ongoing basis?
• How the system works and what it will deliver if its implemented successfully
• And developing the skills necessary to carry our effective performance management often take time – more time than expected.

3. Prepare system and supporting materials and documentation
                            
Develop a process and documentation to support the system. Ensure core competencies are defined with associated behaviours and are communicated to all staff.

Included in the documentation should be:

• Review performance against the key parts of the job
• Review performance against any specific goals or objectives which have been set
• Review performance against the organisation’s core competencies if they have been defined
• Identify any learning and development needs for both short and longer term
• Allow for feedback on progress on an ongoing basis
• Ensure job descriptions are current and in a form that provides clear and measurable results required