Despite business leaders taking a more strategic approach to employee wellbeing, cases of employee stress and burnout continue to rise. Vicky Smith suggests some pertinent solutions for dealing with staff who are finding it hard to cope with modern-day workplace demands
Even with the radical changes that have been made to the way we work in the post-pandemic era, those same human resources are still the income generators for their companies. The stress and burnout statistics will represent only the proportion of staff who have reached the point of overwhelm. They take no account of the even greater numbers of staff who are not yet at that point. Relentless pressure to do more with the same or less is undermining the ability of many employees to perform at their best, or even at all.
Pressure will continue to be a pervasive presence in modern life and work – and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, to create an environment that’s conducive to employees being able to manage pressure in the ways that work for them, and to speak up when demands exceed their ability to cope, leaders must role model behaviours that support, rather than undermine, employee sustainability.
They also need to create the conditions that encourage and allow employees to effectively manage their personal energy resources and, in so doing, build their resilience and capacity. This generates a true win-win. Employees stay accountable, committed and happily engaged without burning out in the process. To achieve this, what’s needed is an improvement in workplace psychological safety.
- Creating an atmosphere of trust
When the work environment exudes an atmosphere of trust and respect, when colleagues are self-aware enough to communicate in effective and meaningful ways, when egos are removed as self-confidence grows, then employees are more likely to make good decisions, speak up when issues loom and express how they feel as pressure builds. All this adds up to a climate known as psychological safety.
When employees feel psychologically safe at work, they feel protected and able to be themselves, safe from the threat of negative consequences if they speak up. This perhaps doesn’t sound as if it would be all that significant, until you consider how costly it is in energy and performance terms to feel unsafe and how likely it is that feeling constantly unsafe will lead to stress. It works the other way around too. If an employee feels even remotely stressed at work, they can’t feel psychologically safe, as these are mutually exclusive states.
Even if a few members of management might choose to shut themselves away in their ivory towers, people don’t generally work in isolation. Co-operation and collaboration are essential features of all organisations, ensuring that the cogs of the corporate machine continue to mesh and turn. Getting to the root cause of workplace issues such as mistakes, failure, underperformance, toxic relationships or declining wellbeing means focusing beyond the task and the employee and concentrating instead on the human being that sits behind them both. When this happens, the ability to collaborate with others to find solutions increases.
- Focus on openness
More open and human collaborations are of benefit to everyone, as they allow the best possible return on the time and energy invested. Despite everyone’s best efforts, time can’t be expanded – it truly is the most democratic of resources. Therefore, the best way forward in our ‘do more with less’, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world is to cultivate openness, be able to tell it like it is, try new approaches and fail faster if it doesn’t work.
For employers to get the best from their human assets, they also need to make it possible for them to behave in accordance with what’s important to them, not just what’s important to their organisations. The zero-sum game being played at present, where staff believe the only way to meet the demands placed on them is to extend the working day into what ought to be recovery time, is not sustainable. The result is clearly visible in the increased stress and burnout statistics. It has become obvious that it’s dangerous to play the work game this way, as it ends in a long, slow sleepwalk into disengagement and reduced wellbeing.
We’re currently at that stage where the confidence to do things differently is high, employee demands are changing and there’s genuine interest and desire to explore more ethical ways of management. This is the perfect time to put the above tips into practice, go way beyond monitoring employees’ 9-to-5 performance and move to an employee-centric approach.
Vicky Smith is passionate about sharing her knowledge and has more than 20 years’ consulting, coaching, facilitation and training experience in locations across the world. Smith holds MSc degrees in organisation development and consultancy, psychology and applied health and exercise. She is working through a PhD, researching psychological safety in organisations and is also a qualified NLP trainer, psychotherapist and executive coach. In addition, she is the co-author with Lesley Cooper of Brave New Leader: How to Transform Workplace Pressure into Sustainable Performance and Growth
