Did you know that April is Stress Awareness Month?

Nowadays, you’d be hard pushed to find anyone who doesn’t feel stressed at some point. For many people it is a daily occurrence which can really take its toll on life. When you’re stressed, and whatever the cause, it certainly can be tough to get through each day. Surely you can relate? It can lead you to overreact or be short with people, it can cause you to shy away from others, or feel overwhelmed by things which normally you’d breeze through. Very often it is easy to feel like the world is caving in on you and your ability to handle situations or be productive either in your personal life or work life is severely hindered. Relationships with family, partners, or work colleagues and bosses very often wear thin. If you’re a business owner or manager, then it is so important to be aware of stress and take the right steps to help reduce its effects among your workforce.

When it comes to stress in the workplace, as employers and managers, you have increasingly more responsibility to care for your employees. While many of the influences of stress among employees remain outside the workplace, such as health issues, challenges in their family, tensions in personal relationships, or the cost-of-living crisis, there is so much you can and must do to help mitigate sources of stress within the workplace. But why is this so important?

What impact does workplace stress have on businesses?

According to the UK Health and Safety Executive, in 2019/2020 17.9million working days were lost due to stress! A further study in 2022  by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and Simply Health determined that 79% of respondents reported some stress-related absence in their organisation over the last year. This increased to 90% in larger organisations (with more than 250 employees).

From an employer’s perspective, it is undeniable that your business will suffer when staff are stressed. Employees will make more mistakes which will cost the business money. They are likely to take more days off work meaning the business can’t operate as effectively or profitably. Stressed staff are also more likely to have a negative impact on the productivity of other staff and their own productivity will be massively hindered.

Additionally, with stressed and unhappy team members, it will inevitably spill over to negatively impact the relations with clients/customers, ultimately costing your business money. In today’s world, a business must do everything it can to gain a slight edge over its competitors and that leading ‘edge’ is certainly making sure employees are well looked after. Furthermore, with such a shift toward remote working since the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become increasing difficult for employers to keep a grasp on employee wellbeing.

In 2021 CIPD determined the main work-related causes of stress were:

  • Workload/volume of work
  • Management style
  • Demands and challenges due to homeworking as a result of COVID-19
  • Non-work factors such as relationships/family, illness and health

 What can employers/managers do to minimise workplace stress?

So given these causes, what can you do to help mitigate these sources of workplace stress?

The first is to help staff or contractors manage their workload as effectively as possible. This means finding ways to help reduce unnecessary (or ineffective) tasks, or often it means helping to integrate new processes or procedures that help staff to be more efficient. Additionally, it’s imperative to help staff and contractors have one central place where they can easily track and manage their responsibilities, helping to avoid delays or reduce costs due to poor management or human error. Often that can mean stepping away from dated paper methods and embracing newer online software and mobile app solutions.

Nowadays, employers need to adopt better practices that empower staff and contractors to work remotely more effectively away from a central office. So, giving them the tools to operate more autonomously is critical – for example, helping them to manage tasks individually, but still plugin to a central system so management can still have their finger on the pulse. Additionally, streamlining communication channels is really important. It can become very easy to lose track when information is scattered across emails, text messages, WhatsApp, paper, and other platforms. So, one system that keeps all communication in one place ensures nothing gets missed.

Finally, no-one likes to spend any more time than is absolutely necessary on admin – chasing up emails, filling in forms and documents, creating invoices, updating logs, or worst still, having to duplicate work on different systems.  So, using tools that help to prevent time wasted and mistakes made will help your business to operate more effectively leading to a reduction in costs, along with enabling staff and contractors to operate in a stress-free way!

The solution? Okappy.

Okappy is a great platform that helps staff and contractors work more efficiently and effectively. It helps to streamline many of the processes a business needs to operate competitively in today’s economic climate.

If you’d like to see how the platform can help save your business time and money, then do get in touch to book a demo.