Did you miss us? Fear not…
One of the best ways to mitigate feelings of stress or overwhelm, is to have positive control of our current state of balance. To ensure we’re practising what we preach, the teams behind Culture Correspondence recently took a week off. Fresh from mini breaks and stuffed full of Easter eggs, we’re back!
This Stress Awareness Month, we’re dedicating a series of hot takes to the topics of stress and burnout at work.
In our last edition of Culture Correspondence we got stuck into establishing the basics; understanding the science of stress and quite literally what’s going on in our brains when a stress response occurs.
Now we’re turning our attention to unravelling the relationship between workplace stress, and the performance, productivity, and overall engagement of your team members.
Reframing Stress: A Natural Part of Being Human
It may feel like stress - including the chronic type that threatens to do some real damage to us - has become an unavoidable part of the modern work environment.
Recently, we attempted to reframe this perception by describing how stress responses are evolutionarily hard-wired into our existence, not our workplaces; some (very basic!) neuroscience proves that stress responses are an important - and constant - part of the human condition.
Work, too, happens to be a fundamental part of the human experience (it’s where the majority of us spend most of our time.)
Our brains, and the requirement for them to be applied in ways that mean we can achieve any number of personal goals by working (earning money, having a family, experiencing a strong sense of purpose, the list goes on…) means that we must normalise talking about that being stressful at times.
In addition to the reactive responses and coping mechanisms we often see (including in far too many cases some distinctly non-beneficial benefits; cue the old adage ‘yoga on your lunch break?’ - you know, the one you haven’t taken for weeks) companies would do well to turn their attention to preventative measures that proactively help mitigate the stress responses that, because you employ human beings, are going to show up.
The unavoidability here is not that the contemporary definition of work is one that has to come with inordinate levels of stress, it’s that people and their degree of mental fitness - informed by the mode they’re operating from at any given time - are coming to work each day, trying to do their best.
Applying that lens, here’s a lovely list of considerations for nurturing a generally less stress-y working environment:
- Say What You See…
Companies that have normalised talking about stress and burnout often establish a cultural norm of defining burnout, what the warning signs of tipping into dangerous ‘chronic stress’ territory look like, and what team members are expected to do (for themselves and their teammates) when those warning signs are showing up. Only with clear definitions in place, and clarification of what we’re talking about to begin with, can people feel enabled to engage in the conversation that needs to follow - making this a crucial first step.
- …And Then, Behave Accordingly!
Too often members of leadership functions get this wrong… They’re not OK with burnout, they reassure candidates during interview processes about all the genuine and well-intended measures that are in place to support trust, flexibility and wellbeing, they attend the leadership development courses and they mean well… before going back to the day job and applying direct and inappropriate pressure to employees.
Don’t be a hypocrite. Leadership teams aren’t above company culture; they’re the primary guardians of it. Take the time to consider your communication, get intentional and if it transpires that those intentions are - actually - to deliberately stress people out (perhaps because you’re too stressed yourself) consider how good a leader that makes you and do the work.
Fear-based leadership, threatening people with their job security and punishing the actions or results of the past is a no-no if you’re going to avoid chronic stress becoming an established part of your culture.
- Productivity: Ambition or Unhealthy Obsession?
Productivity is the measure of how effectively resources are used to achieve organisational goals. Companies are understandably focused on being as productive as possible; but for the vast majority of people who come to work, that’s what they want, too. Let’s turn this into the exciting shared goal it should be instead of the unhealthy obsession it too often becomes.
Productivity relies on honing, optimising and continuously improving; it takes finesse, it takes retrospectives, it takes psychological safety, it requires brain space and thinking time. That is all underpinned by a positive outlook of ambition.
Metaphorically shouting “BE MORE PRODUCTIVE” at people all the time, really ain’t helping… Anything that is jarring and constant can quickly become toxic and toxicity is stressful to be around.
- Engagement: You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ‘til it’s Gone
We’ve all either heard, or perhaps we’ve said the following words at work “ultimately, it’s our health that matters most” or maybe we’ve supported a friend by saying “this is just a job, your health is more important”.
Find yourself saying that too many times, and the road to recovery gets exponentially longer. Chronic stress will erode employee engagement, and being disengaged is stressful.
The cycle continues.
One thing that workplace engagement and our health have in common (as many who experience an accident or injury will attest) is that sometimes, we don’t know what we’ve got til it’s gone. Once engagement has gone, there’s an important second order effect too; team members feel like their engagement has been assumed all along, and that it’s been allowed to slip. That’s some serious People debt when it comes to the psychological contracts we all have with our employers.
Engaged employees are more likely to stay, they’re more likely to volunteer for things and they’re more likely to proactively find ways to hold up their colleagues and form confident, enabled and self-correcting teams. Business is tough, companies change, there IS pressure - and that’s ok. These are all valid statements. What’s not ok is assuming engagement and that there is an endless source of resilience made available.
Word From The Street
Ginni’s favourite quote of the week from the HR Community
Too often in businesses the only path to promotion is through taking on managerial responsibility, and a lack of clarity over potential career development is - you guessed it - stressful! Here’s a collection of some cool alternative suggestions for career enhancement that we’ve seen discussed recently.
- Broader or Deeper: Get creative about enabling people to move from specialist to generalist (or vice versa)
- Company University: Earning a promotion can involve taking a leading role in delivering internal training, cementing institutional knowledge for others, enabling new joiners, or first-time promotees who have themselves stepped up recently. Could a promotion include becoming a Professor at your company’s internal ‘university’?
- Laying the Track so Others Can (Actually) Hit The Ground Running: assigning individuals who have reached a certain level of proficiency in their current sphere to internal org design projects, is a great way to embed transferable skill elsewhere in the business and lay foundations for additional roles on the hire plan in the next 6-12 months.
- Job swaps: most commonly job sharing sees two individuals share responsibility for the achievement of a singularly defined role. Finding two roles that are well-matched to being buddied up (perhaps for a fixed term) can enable a ‘swap’ of responsibility that is an engaging and exciting experience for all involved.
Recommended
No cookie cutters or silver bullets here, just things Ginni thinks are interesting and/or useful.
Did you miss our most recent webinar? (We know we’re biassed, but we think it was pretty good!)
Hear from Kate Higham, Head of Operations, on the measures the Born Social team are taking, to proactively address the impact of stress and burnout, including policies and embedded cultural practices.