For Stress Awareness Day, we asked our Senior Trainer, Paol, to share his thoughts on tackling stress in the workplace and supporting wellbeing.
November 5th is not only about Bonfire Night, but it is also Stress Awareness Day, a great opportunity to talk about workplace stress.
Spoiler alert, not ALL stress is bad stress. A challenging project that stretches your talents, a job promotion or learning a new skill, this is eustress, the good kind that inspires and energises us. Boredom and a lack of challenge? It is surprisingly destructive to health as well, called ‘boreout’. The stress we need to address is distress: the chronic, overwhelming type that leads to burnout, anxiety and low self-esteem.
We all know what too much feels like: the Sunday evening dread, the finding of things still to be done that feels like running for your life with a list in one hand that never decreases. The feeling that you are juggling flaming torches whilst riding on a unicycle. Too little challenge is just as much an issue, leaving people disengaged and demotivated and ironically, stressed. The answer is meaningful work that is challenging without being crushing.
When stress tips into chronic distress the results are serious. It affects our sleep, relationships, physical health and ability to work well. To employers, the consequences are stark, increased sickness absence, higher turnover, reduced productivity. Many workplaces are now making the leap from regarding mental health as an awkward subject to a strategic priority.
The good news is that small changes equal big gains, a mentally healthy workplace does not require a complete overhaul. It starts with normalising frequent and open conversations about mental wellbeing, encouraging in work and out of work activities that help manage stress and leaders asking genuine questions about how employees are coping.
Of course, it is important for us all to take responsibility for our own resilience, but it’s only part of the story. If the workplace measures success and productivity in the number of hours worked and sets unrealistic expectations the challenge remains. The real change occurs when organisations take a collective view of responsibility for employee wellbeing.
This Stress Awareness Day, why not take the plunge and invest in your workplace mental health? Coventry, Warwickshire and Worcestershire Mind offer comprehensive mental health training for teams and managers with usable tools for supporting wellbeing and effectively dealing with stress.
What is more, the money organisations invest in our training goes back into the community, supporting our services and in the mission that everyone has the right to better mental health. Your workplace development becomes community support, a true win-win situation.
Click the link below to discover how our training can help your organisation move from firefighting stress to preventing it, making every day a little less explosive and a lot more sustainable.