There’s so much happening in the world at large and the world of work specifically right now. Work stress is at an all-time high for a lot of people and it’s leading to lower life satisfaction. How do we need to respond? In this blog post, I share individual and organizational strategies for reducing work stress.
The US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health defines work stress as the harmful physical and emotional responses that occur when the requirements of a job don’t match the capabilities, resources, or needs of the worker.
This definition is really important because it speaks to the dual nature of work stress in that there’s the individual piece.
The onus on some level is on individuals to be able to potentially advocate for themselves in terms of getting the resources they need, but also really engaging in enough reflection self-awareness to know when a role doesn’t match their needs and they need to exit.
At the same time, it also speaks to the onus that is an organization to be providing resources for workers, creating setting situations and spaces that do meet the needs of workers. This is because work stress has been linked to negative physical and mental outcomes and negative individual outcomes.
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Strategies for Reducing Work Stress
Tier 1 Work Stress Strategies
Individual Tier 1 Strategies
As I mentioned earlier, tier 1 strategies are those interventions that address stress by either reducing or even removing potential stressors entirely before they can become a problem.
This type of intervention is focused on addressing potential sources of physical, emotional, or mental, or even just psychosocial stress at work at the individual level.
Some individual tier 1 strategies include:
1. Developing better planning skills.
You can improve your ability to plan out how you will accomplish your work tasks and create a vision for reaching your goals.
When you write things down and have a clear vision with strategy, it can reduce the overwhelm that occurs when you’re just thinking of big tasks.
When you just leave them in your head, they seem insurmountable. It seems like, “oh my gosh, how am I ever going to accomplish this? I don’t have the strategies or the tools that I need!” but when you write things down, and create a plan, then all you have to do is follow your plan step-by-step.
But, if you’re going to create plans that actually help you reduce work stress, it’s going to be important that you get clarification on tasks from your manager or supervisor.
Make sure that you’re doing work that is relevant. You have to ensure that you’re actually doing work that you need to be doing, that is moving you towards your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and knowing what your KPIs are.
To write things down, it’s best that you get a work journal can help you stay organized with your plans. It can be used for reflection, but it can also be where you start to plan out things, make your lists, record your goals and achievements, and how you’re going to reach them.
2. Developing better time management.
Increasing your ability to establish goals, identify your priorities, and monitor your progress towards attaining your goals so that you can better manage your time overall can help minimize feeling stressed.
For a lot of people, when you feel like you don’t have enough time to accomplish everything that’s on your plate, that in itself can cause you to feel stressed.
One thing I like to do every Sunday is to sit down and plan the entire week by thinking, “what are the goals I need to achieve?” and then I break down the days of the week, then ask myself “what am I doing on what day?”
There’s a marked difference in the weeks that I do that compared to the weeks that I don’t.
When I go into my week without a plan, when I haven’t mapped out and broken it down across the week, I’m working frantically. I feel overwhelmed. I can just tell the difference in my energy and emotional state.
Definitely, I encourage you to spend some time planning.
However, ensure that you use planning methods that work for you. Whether it’s a physical or digital planner, break larger tasks into smaller tasks across the week, and just set regular deadlines and check-in point for yourself.
3. Make sure that you are in an aligned role.
I gave that definition of work stress at the beginning of this post for a reason. When the requirements of the job don’t match your needs as an employee, you’re going to be stressed because you’re always working out of alignment, and it is IMPOSSIBLE to feel calm and peaceful when you’re in a place of misalignment.
It’s important that you are in a role that is aligned with your values, interests, and skills. Having an aligned role will allow you to move forward in your job with some semblance of peace.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to feel calm and at peace when you're in a place of misalignment. Share on X4. Constantly monitor and manage your work environment.
This is being aware of physical or even just your mental workspace. You see, the more regularly you are aware of the people, energy, and work around you, the easier it’ll be for you to identify sources of potential triggers for work stress… before they even set in!
If you’re engaging in regular journaling and reflecting on your interactions at work, it can help you start to see or even identify patterns that might serve as potential triggers for work stress.
Organizational Tier 1 Strategies
The preventative strategies that companies and organizations can be intentional about implementing include:
1. Creating a workspace that is physically safe and ergonomically sound for employees
As an organization, you can commit to creating office spaces that are healthy for your employees physically. The overall look and vibe of the workplace make a huge difference to the stress level. As you audit the work environment, some questions to ask include:
- What kind of furniture is the staff using?
- What does the layout of the office look like?
- Are there emergency exits?
- How is the ventilation?
- Is the office a well-lit area?
2. Promoting a culture of regular breaks in the workday
Put an end to the hustle culture.! Instead, promote a culture where it’s okay to step out for 15 minutes to either take a walk or breathe in some fresh air; giving your employees space to take a break does a lot more positively for your employees’ mental health than it does negatively for your bottom line.
More often than not, employees will come back from breaks feeling more productive and reinvigorated.
3. Increasing employee participation in decision making and work planning
One thing that can lead to stress is when employees feel like they don’t have a choice or a say in work and how work is being done.
To address this, increasing participation in making decisions to the best of your ability (as a leader) can make a marked difference in reducing work stress for your team.
4. Matching job description with employee skills and qualifications
Make sure that you’re matching job descriptions with employees’ skills and qualifications. Don’t hire people for roles that are misaligned as it relates to resources, abilities, and needs for the job. All this does is increase stress in your organization.
5. Creating clear pathways to promotion, rewards, and advancement in the organization
Creating these pathways will let your team know where their work is leading. They need to be informed of the outcome of this role for them professionally so that their work feels intentional which ultimately can reduce stress.
Tier 2 Work Stress Strategies
The tier 2 interventions addressed stress by supporting the development of coping strategies or skills. Coping skills refer to your ability to actually deal with stressful situations in a way that generally doesn’t lead to negative health outcomes.
Individual Tier 2 Strategies
At the individual level, you can either utilize coping strategies that are focused on the solution or those that are focused on emotional expression.
Solution-focused coping strategies
These involve a focus on taking action that either changes a situation or your response to the situation. Some individual solution-focused strategies you can use to cope with stress include:
- Setting clear work boundaries for yourself at work
- Using conflict resolution strategies to navigate stress that might exist in a relationship with either coworkers or your manager
Emotion-focused strategies
On the other hand, these strategies don’t actively remove job stressors or reduce work stress. Instead, these allow you to express or purge emotions that may be exacerbating your feelings of stress.
Some individual emotion-focused coping strategies include
- Journaling regularly about your emotions and experiences so you can express them
- Cultivating a tribe that can support you
- Adapting mindset shifts that will allow you to look at yourself from a strengths-based approach instead of a weakness focus. Ask yourself, “what is the negative self-talk that is actually stressing me out and exacerbating my anxiety at work?”. Your response can help you identify how you can start to shift to more liberating statements and beliefs and thoughts about yourself that energize you and invigorate you to do your work.
Organizational Tier 2 Strategies
What can companies do to help employees develop effective coping strategies? 👇🏾
1. Establishing mentoring programs
Mentoring programs provide a space for employees to receive a regular stream of support, resource support, and potential emotional outlets without being penalized for it can create avenues for employees to cope with stress.
2. Establishing Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)
For the same reasons listed previously, ERGs can create safe spaces for employees to navigate stressful situations.
When doing this, it’s very important that you’re consulting the research that shows the impact of resource groups and strategies for creating spaces where people actually feel safe enough to leverage the ERGs; instead of just having an ERG for the sake of it.
If people don’t actually feel safe enough to participate in the groups, it’s going to be pointless.
3. Routine health surveillance
Consider screening for high blood pressure and stress symptoms in your employees.
You can also try engaging in training and education of your employees about stress, the signs of stress, and the impact of strategies for reducing work stress.
4. Training and education of employees about stress, signs, and its impact
Make sure you consult with an actual professional when you are implementing training and education like this for your employees.
Shameless plug: you can consult with me. I’m happy to come into your organization and consult on ways that you can shift things around to make your workspaces physically and psychologically safer for employees.
Tier 3 for Work Stress Strategies
These interventions are generally implemented for workers who are already experiencing stress.
In addition, these are focused on stress management by treating or repairing harm that has already occurred as a result of stressors that were not effectively coped with.
Individual Tier 3 Strategies
Below are the strategies that you can use if you find yourself thinking “okay, I’ve already reached that point where I’m experiencing work stress, I feel like I’m on the brink of burnout. I’m exhausted. I need something now”:
1. Counseling
Invest in yourself and get counseling. A lot of organizations these days are paying for their employees’ counseling sessions. So, if you’re worried about the cost, look at your health benefits and see if that’s something that’s covered through work.
2. Adopting mindfulness practices
Research has shown that mindfulness literally changes the brain. It makes the brain more resilient and can help repair previous harm from stress and trauma.
As a result, adopting mindfulness practices can be a game-changer or healing physical and emotional side effects of stress.
3. Implementing intentional sleep, rest, and rejuvenation practices
If you are already experiencing stress, you are depleted and exhausted. You need to pour back into yourself.
Therefore, at this stage of stress experience, your goal really should be looking at how you can feed your mind, body, and spirit to replenish what has been drained because of all the stress that you have experienced at work.
Organizational Tier 3 Strategies
Interventions that organizations can use to help improve stress management include:
1. More flexible work arrangements
As it relates to the hours that people are working, allowing for more flexible work arrangements is important. An example of this could be implementing remote work, allowing employees to select what days or hours they work and so on.
2. Implementing Employee Resource Groups (ERG)
ERGs can also be considered tier 3 interventions as company cultures that don’t promote diversity often result in higher levels of stress, lower performance and higher turnover for employees.
Employee resource groups can reinforce the value and importance of diversity in organizations.
3. Provide training for managers and leaders to help them develop effective management skills.
Help your managers and leaders develop effective management skills that actually aim to avoid retraumatizing or increase in the stress that your employees face.
Implementing ERGs without putting leadership in place that is dedicated to actually making employees feel included, safe and valued and less stressed is futile. Leadership has to be on board with changing culture and creating safe spaces.
That being said, training is key for making that happen.
4. Implementing general health care management policies
Establishing wellness programs that promote employees’ physical and mental health can be critical for reducing work stress. Additionally, wellness can go a long way to helping employees develop stress management abilities.
Furthermore, in implementing all these things, leadership should also be modeling what it looks like to take a break to foster mental health and engage in self-care.
Why? Because you can have all these resources in place, but also have employees that feel very scared to leverage them.
Employees often will feel scared to take their PTO (Paid Time Off) to use healthcare benefits, because they’re worried about how it will make them look.
- Will they look like they’re not committed to their work?
- Will leadership see them as being weak?
- What will people say about them?
That is a common fear that employees have around leveraging wellness resources.
And so, the onus falls on leadership to model what it looks like to take a break so your team knows that you are okay with them taking breaks. Modeling this behavior publicly also normalizes the behavior and act of taking care of oneself in the organization.
I hope you’ll notice as you read about these individual and organizational strategies that neither one or the other can effectively mitigate work stress without the other one.
So, at the individual level, employees need to be doing what they can to develop coping strategies.
However, organizations also need to be intentional about creating spaces and a culture reducing work stress.
In the long run, companies who do this tend to benefit because they are now experiencing lower turnover, increased productivity, increased engagement, and increased motivation and are spending less on accidents and health outcomes.
According to the World Health Organization, for every $1 that is put into treatment for common mental health disorders, there’s a return of $4 in improved health and productivity of your employees.
When you take time and actually invest in your employees, it’s just stack, it’s an investment and you will see a return on your investment.
Did any of those strategies help you in thinking about ways to mitigate stress, prevent stress, or even cope with stress when it does occur both for yourself and for your organization? Let me know in the comments below.
