Workplace Stress
- JIAHAO GUO
- Apr 4, 2020
- 2 min read
Stress is a thing that we will face daily, and workplace stress appears when the employee's work is over the abilities and resources of he or she. And the impacts vary among workers, some may be positive while others may be negative. In most cases, if people can adjust to the stress, they can continue to work and have good performance on their jobs. However, if stress is continuous and unreasonable, it may result in illness in physical and mental. In terms of physical, several diseases may appear such as immune deficiency, endocrine disorders; while on the psychological part, depression, anxiety or even suicide may happen depending on the extent.
Therefore, it is vital and essential to identify, prevent and have a good management on work-related pressure.
1. How to identify the workplace stress
The easiest way to identify work-related stress is depending on your personal feeling. When you are working, you feel not good, and cannot complete the job efficiently, which means you may probably under workplace stress.
From Safework SA, there is a four-step approach can help employees to deal with workplace stress. First of all, hazards are identified in the workplace. And then we can asses the risks from the stressors including workload, poor support or relationships. At this point, a risk assessment needs to conduct. Once we identify potential risks, we can move to the next step.
The picture above is the risk assessment matrix. Each employee can use it as a guide to assess the stressors on themselves to see which factor is most contributed to the stress, and then can prioritize the order and improve them later.
2. How to prevent workplace stress
About the prevention, for employees, we need to assess our abilities correctly in case of overestimation on the workload. Moreover, we can communicate more with managers to fully understand their expectations, so we can complete the jobs at a high quality.
For managers and supervisors, there are several things to be in mind. Firstly they need to clearly know the upper ability limit of each employee so that the jobs allocated don’t exceed it. Besides the environment should be supportive. For example, when one worker is in difficulty, other colleagues can give him a hand.
3. How to manage workplace stress
Once working stress happens, the most important action is to adjust our attitude. After that, some simple actions can be implemented to arrange the stress effectively by ourselves, which include:
l ask the support from other employees like competent colleagues and mentors
l assess different employees’ workload through collection of views of peers, supervisors and managers to have a good estimation on ourselves.
l have a good work/life balance and develop some habits which you can do at weekends to relax yourselves like surfing, fishing.
Finally, If we cannot handle the stress by ourselves, we need to seek the advice from the psychologists or other supportive services.
References
1. https://www.safework.sa.gov.au/sites/default/files/resources/work-related_stress.pdf?v=1546561190
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