Stress Management In The Work Place
Stress Management In The Work Place
Chapter one: Introduction
In some instances, workplace stress is considered normal aspect. For instance, workplace stress concerning the meeting of a deadline for a task one is aware of is normal as the employee is pushed to put more effort. The employee in this case has the skills and is only limited by time. However, excessive workplace stress is harmful as it has the impact of interfering with employee productivity and impact on his or her emotional and physical health. In the workplace, stress among employees is an extremely expensive epidemic today. Estimates indicate that US employers spend almost $250 billion per year to manage rising workplace stress situations.
Introduction to the problem
Today, no organization is free immune to stress. All organizations large and small, profit and nonprofit, global or local, nongovernmental or governmental agency are prone to workplace stress amongst their employees. In the recent past, workplace stress among employees has become a considerable issues especially due to worsening economic situations resulting to organization cost cutting and employees’ layoffs. Employees are no longer sure what the organizational cost cutting measures would be and a level of work place stress is developed. Most companies are taking the options of employees’ layoffs and budget cuts which contribute to increased fear, hesitation and high stress levels owing to increased working hours thereby fatigue (Forbes, 2011). in addition, organizational restructuring, mergers, strategizing, and Sigma Six initiative adoption among others are signs that the levels of workplace stress are not anywhere near going. This is because these are effective ways of coping with current market advances in technology, competition and demographic forces. Changes in organizational activities are another way of introduction of stress among employees especially in cases where the organization will be forced to alter how they do business.
Although there are countless ways of coping with workplace stress, the initiatives on stress management in most organizations fail. According to Segal, Smith, Robinson, and Sega, (2012), 40% of all workplace related illnesses in Great Britain were caused by stress in 2011/12. In addition, the occupations that reported the highest rates of work-relate stress were health professionals especially the nurses, teaching and educational professionals and care service providers. The key to successful workplace stress management is the identification of stressors and formulation of lasting solutions for them. Stress among organizational employees affects their performance and productivity which is why employees should strive to control their physical and emotional wellbeing. When employees take control of their health, communication and sharing of ideas becomes easy. In addition, the established stress free environment results to increased motivation and productivity (Quast, 2011). A stress free work environment is also remarkably vital in meeting the needs of stakeholders as each individual can account for what one’s actions.
Background of the study
Today, the level of work-related stress has reached epic proportions. Organizational stress management is a critical issue as organizations struggle to adapt to new social and economic conditions. Stress management inconsistency is becoming a rule among some organizations which have failed in meeting satisfactory stress management levels. For some organizations, however, stress management has been successful owing to the efforts in identifying stress factors and establishing of lasting solutions. In such workplace environments, the employees are motivated thereby exhibiting high performance and productivity in their work. However, in stress filled work environments, employees are characterized by negative emotions such as irritability, fear, and anxiety which interfere with effective productivity. In addition, the supervisory layers in such environments are bureaucracy weighted down resulting to clumsy inability to coordinate efforts in stress management amongst different employees. As a result, the organization becomes incapable of reacting speedily to meet unrelenting global market and customers’ demands.
After years of failed work-related stress management, employees are required to note and avoid negative workplace elements that result to stress. In addition, employees are asked to consider elaborate communication skills since this will allow for coordination with others thereby resulting to certainty in handling workplace stress. Through the adoption of elaborate communication skills, technical and human understanding, acute observation, skill in collaboration and creative problem solving will be promoted in all sectors of work. In addition, effective communication promotes an environment where employees and management can share ideas and issues thereby improving relationships (Spiers, 2012). Although stress management efforts in some organizations may fail, it is critical that organizations manage to adapt to the shifting burden of stressful work environments. This will ascertain that the work environment is suitable for employees’ high productivity and enhanced performance through the management of emotional consequences arising from continued transformation and change. In the literature, considerable attention is paid to commercial for profit organizations. This is because most for profit organizations strive to optimize resources, contain their costs while realizing their goals.
Statement of the problem
In the past few years, organizational stress has gained more attention as organizations try to come into terms with the fact that there is no absolute solution to workplace stress management. This has been as a result of the different ways through which different individuals respond to stress. As a result, stress management at the workplace has differed from one individual to the other and from one organization to the other. In order for organizations to implement workplace related stress management successfully, there is the need to adapt strategies that assist employees to manage workplace stress. Within every living organizational system, stress is bound to occur at manageable or unmanageable levels. The level of stress impact and management within an individual differs from that of another individual. The level of stress management in an individual can be changed or improved accordingly. However, it is not automatic that the level of stress management of individuals within an organization would add up to the required level of stress management level of the organization as a whole. Organizational management should evaluate workplace stress management strategies that work best to manage stress for their employees. This calls employers’ commitment to understand the causes of stress and establish the best strategies to manage stress within their work environment. Commitment will also reassure employees that their contribution is valued relevant to the organizations’ mission, goals and objectives. Two examples of organizations that have implemented effective workplace stress management are Cisco Systems Inc. and Aetna.
Purpose of the study
The purpose of this study was to establish sophisticated ways of managing stress within an organization. The study also examined and pinpointed the factors that le to the development of stress among employees and also determine ways of minimizing workplace stress. Best practices of work-related stress management from Aetna and Cisco Systems Inc. reveal that stress free work environment improves employees’ productivity and organizational performance. In addition, effective stress management provides employees with increased capability to identify and avoid stressors within the work environment. This study focused on stress management in the workplace in order to establish elaborate stress management strategies based on existing research. As stressors continue to increase in the workplace, elaborate way of managing stress at the workplace should be found by organizations.
Project objectives
The study’s objective was to establish elaborate ways of managing stress within an organization. Minor objectives were to pinpoint factors that led to stress at the workplace and determine ways of minimizing stress in the workplace.
Significance of the study
This study intended to add to the field of business management. Business management requires that managers are efficient in guaranteeing that all operations run as desired. Job stress management effectively ensures that business operations run as expected. It is the responsibility of organizational management to that the work environment retains minimal or no stress levels. The study collected data from three reputable organizations which are Aetna, Cisco Systems Inc and State University of New York. The collected data was on the ways used to manage employees’ work related stress, pinpointing factors that resulted to stress in these workplaces before then determining ways of reducing workplace stress in the three organizations. For the first time, organizations can establish elaborate ways of managing stress within their organizations, pinpoint stress causing factors and establish ways of reducing stress at the workplace.
Assumptions and limitations
The study was limited to employees within managerial positions, clerical positions and support staff within three reputable organizations. It was assumed that the data collected can be generalized to a larger population of commercial organizations. The study also assumed that all participants had the ability to read and write answers for the survey. Finally, it was assumed that participants provided honest and informed responses to the posed questions.
Nature of the study: theoretical /conceptual framework
The study applied a mix methodology approach for three for profit organizations. The data collected was analyzed and the findings noted. From the findings, elaborate ways of managing stress in the workplace were established. In addition, the effective ways applied to ensure that employees remain productive were established by managers. For the study, research related questionnaires and interviews were included. The interview entailed face-to-face question answer meetings. For the questionnaires, questionnaire packets containing the instrument were delivered to the three companies and were researcher administered. The completed pack of questionnaires was delivered to the researcher for analysis.
Organization of the remainder of the paper
Chapter 2 will provide a review of theoretical perspectives of ways of dealing with managing stress within the organization, the factors that contribute to work-related stress, and ways of minimizing work-related stress.
Chapter 3 will include the methods used in collecting data on organizational stress management, contributing factors and ways of workplace stress minimization.
In chapter 4, the findings of the data will be provided.
Chapter 5 will provide the summary and conclusion of the leading findings, and the study implications provided.
Chapter two: literature review
Definition of organizational stress
For most people, stress is not just a common word but also a daily experience at work, home and around us. Organizational stress is a common form of stress to employees and employers have to seek effective strategies to manage it. Each person handles stress differently based on the need to remain safe on the job, maximize performance, and sustain mental and physical health. Workplace stress is a hazard to the health of workers now more than ever. This can be accredited the nature of work that is changing within the workplace which has taken a whirlwind speed. Several researchers have tried to define organizational stress. For instance, Woodman and Hardy (2001) defined work related stress as, social psychological, stress. The conceptualization of organizational stress has been seen as the interaction resulting between an employee and the work environment where he or she is represented.
CDC (2012) defines workplace stress as the harmful physical and emotional response resulting from the mismatch between job requirements and the employee’s needs, capabilities, and resources. Workplace stress differs from job challenges in that challenges increases an employee’ s psychological and physical being causing him, or her to be motivated to learn new skills thereby mastering their jobs. When challenges are met, employees feel relaxed and satisfied. However, when challenges become too demanding such that they cannot be met, employees become exhausted, and satisfaction turns to stress.Woodman and Hardy (2001) argue that job stress is never resident in the workplace environment or individual. On the contrary, the core to job stress is a person’s cognitive evaluation of the workplace situation (Woodman and Hardy, 2001). Given this definition, workplace stress has been defined for professional settings such as medicine, education, and business where organization stress levels are viewed to be highest. Some settings where organizational stress has been investigated include police departments, schools, government agencies, military organizations, medical professionals and other corporations.
Nature of organizational stress
Better health (2012) states that workplace stress is problematic in the US and globally. The main reason for increasing attention on workplace stress is its impact on employees’ health and wellbeing and organizational productivity. With increased competition in the business world, organizations have to strive to remain competitive. In stress filled work environment, competition sustenance is not possible owing to increased disability time, increased work days absent, increased stress hyperactivity, reduced productivity measures, increased doctor’s office visits, elevated frequencies of headaches and grievances (BLS, n.d). Employers are increasingly becoming aware of the increasing issue of stress of organizational employees owing to associate with productivity and the costs of health. Apart from improved physical and mental employee’s health, stress management is associated with the benefits of improved employees efficiency, motivation, effectiveness and general employee attitude within the workplace. For the employer, these improvements have a substantial impact on cost savings (BLS, n.d).In the US, work related stress is one of the top ten industrial ailments (Gray, 1998). Gray emphasizes the fact that not less than 25% of US workers is psychologically stressed at any moment in time. With the truth in such a claim, then the health of the larger society is at stake thereby calling for the need to addressed workplace stress issue to promote national health.
Causes of work related stress
Majority of researchers agree that job stress is the outcome of the interface of the presented work environment and people (CDC, 2012). However, disagreements arise on the significance of employee attributes versus working conditions as the core cause of stress. This disagreement is beneficial as it presents three different perspective of studying organizational stress. These perspectives are the environment characteristics, employee’s experience, and transactional phenomenon created by the process of interacting with the environment. According to CDC (2012), it is possible to predict whether or not certain conditions will result to stress. This can be done using the differences in individual characteristics such as personality and coping style. For some persons, some situations may result to stress while to another person, the same situation may not be a problem. These situations are important in assisting managers to determine the best way to help employees to cope wit demanding job conditions. Despite these individual differences, scientific evidence suggests that some working conditions are stressful to most people. These leaves working conditions to be the main source of job stress (CDC, 2012). Numerous causes of work-related stress exist. These causes include long working hours, heavy workload, threat of redundancy or job loss, job insecurity and conflict with other workers or bosses.
Other causes of workplace stress are job qualifications, work design, organization structure, authority ambiguity and conflicting authority sources, organization structure, and performance evaluation. Stress in the workplace can also result from role conflict, role ambiguity, role conflict and lack of responsibility. For all these and other stress cause, significant impact has been found on job performance and job satisfaction. Some jobs tend to have higher stress levels compared to others. Examples include fire and police which are associated with demanding customers. Other job occupations like healthcare are associated with high stress owing to demanding time pressure. In the manufacturing industry, high work stress levels are associated with highly repetitive nature of work. These examples should not be used to limit job stress only to specific jobs or industry. Every profession is prone to stress.
Statistics on job stress
According to Northwestern National life study, 40% of the workers report being in extremely stressful jobs while a quarter of all employees perceives their work as the number one life stressor. In addition, 26% of employees were found in a family, and work institute study to get burnt out or stressed by their work often. Increase in job stress cases was proved by a Princeton Survey research associates study which reported that the level of stress on the job was higher now than was the case a generation ago (Hansen, 2012). These statistics reveal that managers need to adapt effective job stress management strategies to assist in the creation of productive work environment where high organizational performance is expected.
Stress management in the workplace
Organizational management has the role of motivating employees towards higher productivity. As a manager, one must understand that impact of stress on employee morale and organizational culture are devastating. Numerous organizations are struggling to survive in an ever changing and highly volatile market environment. According to Latt (2008), employees’ performance and motivation are strong tools for organizational long term success. In stress filled workplaces, employees are unmotivated and make it difficult to formulate and put into motion employees’ motivational strategies. With motivated employees, teamwork establishment and sustenance is possible. However, unmotivated employees fail to achieve desired goals since employees are not devoted to their work. Latt (2008) argues that employees motivation results from factors such as needs, rewards, determined goals, dignity, beliefs and a wealth among others. These factors are relevant as they keep the employee devoted to his or her work. In addition, driving forces to better employee motivation and performance are driven by technology which prevents organization marginalization and sustaining its competitive advantage. Other changes taking place within the business external environment directly influence organizational and employees’ motivation.
Some of the changes external to the business environment are of economical, social and political nature. Every day, organizations are faced with these challenges of globalization and technological advances. Organizational managers, on their part, are required to redesign the workplace such that organizational productivity remains while employees’ motivation is not compromised. Employers also have to ensure that the organization remains loyal and dependable n on its employees. Employee motivation is driven by factors such as identifying and fitting employees needs, performance related pay, and encouraging team dynamics. For instance, IBM which was ranked the best organization to work in 2007 was characterized by highest ethical offers to employees. These offers included employees’ motivation, job security and high remuneration for employees. In order for managers to understand the employees’ perspective it is best to understand motivation first. This way, managers will understand what employers should offer to have their employees remain motivated. In addition, managers must always view employee motivation as a way of employees’ retention. These guarantees the organization sustained competitive advantage.
When employees are motivated, the work environment is characterized by acceptable levels of productivity. This can be attributed to little or no opportunities for absenteeism, visits to the doctor’s office, frequency of headaches, and grievances among others. This means that there are few opportunities for productivity decrease. Job stress must be properly recognized and addressed. This is important given that job stress results to instances where employees are forced to deviate from their normal functioning. These results to employee inability to meet job demands, inability to build and maintain amiable relationships with colleagues, inability to manage subordinate staff, working against will inability to make progress in the research area, and working on holidays and overtime among others. Managers must look out for and manage such situations since they result to increased instances of low productivity, which in return affects organizational overall performance.
Employers should understand that stress management is an asset to their organization. This implies that, managers should seek to make the best stress managers such that employees run to them for stress management situations. These means that leaders should strive to offer stress management guidance and direction to their employees. Depending on the source of stressors, managers must seek to assist employees in recovering from stressful situations. During stress identification within the organization, managers must evaluate themselves to identify if they are the sources of stress for their employees. One cause of stress for employees is bad bosses. This means that a manager should not rule out the fact that one could bear the stress being experienced by organizational employees. According to Nowack and Wimer (n.d), toxic bosses inflict havoc in organizations. In some cases, the bosses are extremely experienced, industrious and result oriented individuals in the organization. This could have the impact of nerveless productivity, low team moral, and stress disability. For effective stress management, managers must seek to lead by example by curbing all instances of boss oriented job stress. Bosses oriented work stress is the main cause of low employees’ retention which means that the organization will fail to invest in talent management. Managers must learn to encourage and reward healthy management practices.
When employees work in a stress free environment, they are more likely to become distracted from their work. This means that tasks within the organization will be achieved in the right time. During organizational projects, stress related situations are extremely likely to occur. Stress has the impact reducing employees’ motivation which can result to slackness in completion of organizational tasks. Project tasks require timely completion, which calls for the meeting of deadlines. This has the impact of reducing productivity and missing out on deadlines. Managers should be able to identify stressors within the workplace environment and work towards achieving an environment where business run smoothly. Motivated employees are also less likely to engage in unethical issues compared to employees lacking motivation. When organization stress is managed properly within the workplace, unethical practices are never used for shortcut purposes. Unethical issues result to blame games or finger pointing. Managers within the organization must ensure that stress management strategies in the workplace can solve ethical issues.
In the presence of workplace finger pointing and blame games, there are too many conflicts owing to opinions and personality variations. In case of conflict arising from stress, first they accumulate before they explode. Conflict in the workplace is destructive to effective teamwork. Conflict in the workplace is a source of workplace stress that breaks down cooperation while threatening team mission (Pathak, 2010). Research has found out that high level of role ambiguity and role conflict result to high levels of mental conditions. Role ambiguity occurs when there is a level of uncertainty on the aspect of a person’s job, priorities, and expectations among others. Conversely, role conflict occurs a job is characterized by conflicting demands. From research, workplace conflict has been associated with reduction in productivity and group dissatisfaction (Pathak, 2010). However, lack of strife within the top management teams and decision making groups is associated with increased performance at group and organizational levels. During stress management, employees should seek to identify the source of conflict associated with the stress and use the right strategy to resolve them.
Other reasons why managers should seek to manage stress efficiently are: encouraging smooth running of projects, improved ability to establish teamwork and team building and importance in performance appraisal writing. During stress management, managers must seek to identify situations where employees are uncertain about the outcomes and the importance attached to the outcome. This is because for employees the perception of uncertainty in winning or losing, stress levels is high. Managers must then seek to ensure that employees perception of different situations work towards the best of their interests. In addition, managers must seek to identify whether the stressors arise from task demand, role demands, organizational structure, role demands organizational life stage or organizational leadership. Task demands are associated to the nature of work organization in the job of an individual while role demands are issues arising from the function played by an individual within an organization. Each stage of organizational life cycle, establishment, growth, maturity and decline, is associated with different pressures. These pressures affect each employee who then responds differently. Managers should seek to identify organizational life stage related stress and devise ways to manage it accordingly.
Chapter three: Methodology
Case in point
The study focused on organizational stress. It describes the perception of a wide range of employees in managerial positions, clerical position and the support staff. The primary objective of the study was to focus on stress management strategies employed among employees in the organizations. The study involved comparison of data which was only possible through the assistance of three organizations. This study’s three organizations included Creative Beauticians College, HealthMatters health center and HappyCare Nursing home. Beauticians College has two branches in the area and employs over 100 employees. HealthMatters Health center is a privately owned for profit health institution with approximately 60 employees while HappyCare Nursing home is also privately owned institution for elderly care with an approximately 170 employees.
Sample
Data was collected from three reputable organizations namely HealthMatters health center, HappyCare nursing home and Creative Beauticians College. From Creative Beauticians College, 63 participants took part in the study voluntarily with 36 being females. At HealthMatters Health center, 56 participants took part in the study with 26 being female while 81 participants took part in the study from and 44 were female. In the study, the targeted number of participants was 200. In the three institutions, employees who participated ranged from managerial positions, clerical positions and support staff. In the project, participation was voluntary and anonymity was guaranteed. In these three organizations, all employees had the ability to participate voluntarily.
Research methodology
For the study, questionnaires were distributed to managerial, clerical, and support staff. In each institution, questionnaires distribution was done at a brief voluntary meeting. Working days were selected in questionnaires distribution such that all employees were present. For some clerical and support staff, face to face interviews were employed with the participation of a researcher. These responses were recorded for purposes of data analysis. Interview questions used were both closed and open questions. Open interview questions were used for further discussion.
Chapter four: Results
Various causes were associated with causing work-related stress. From the threes institutions, stress causes were classified into demands, control, support, relationships, role, and change.
Demands
Demands on employees occur in the form of the amount of work and type of work one is expected to do. For most employees, a certain amount of pressure and challenge in their work was necessary. Such level of challenge and the pressure was attributed to motivation and a sense of ambition. However, this amount of pressure and challenge needed be controlled to avoid instances when it would become stressful and not simulating. During high demands, employees agreed that they felt overloaded and they could not complete the amount of work given to them within the provided time. In addition, overloading of employees occurred when the work they were required to do turned out to be difficult and they were not capable of doing it. Within the three institutions, stressful work environment was not attributed to low productivity. Managers in HappyCare Nursing home reported that they were aware that they employees were subjected to a stressful work environment. In this case, they had come up with an effective stress management strategy that sought for the balance between challenging demands and stressful demands. The stress management strategy at HappyCare College had influenced the job design, flexible working and training level. HealthMatters heath Center admitted only managing employees’ stress through the introduction of flexible working hours to help manage the demands of the employees.
Control
Among the interviewed participants, lack of control on how and when one does his or her job was associated with disaffection and poor employee performance. For most of the employees, stress levels could be easily managed through the provision of employee control over all that goes on in the workplace. At Creative Beauticians, employees claimed they lacked control over what went on owing to over – supervision. From Creative Beauticians College Management, supervision was part of training and promotion of high quality services. There was no room for errors since this would cost the organization are market share.
Support
In the three institutions, there was little or no support provided to employees for their strengths or weaknesses. In addition, there was an overall inability of managers to deal with stressed employees. In most job related stress cases, managers remained unaware of the short term absence and disagreement between employees. At HappyCare, every new staff is provided with training during orientation. However, employees at HappyCare claimed that there was no regular staff meeting and if any, they were held at extremely spaced time durations once or twice in a year. Stress in organizations is inevitable. As a result, organization should establish training to top management on how to deal with stressed staff and in holding regular meetings in order to discuss stress issues facing the employees. Regular staff meetings were regular for employees in Creative Beauticians College and HealthMatters healthcare institution.
Clear policies and build relationships
Failure to establish relationships based on accepable behavior and trust can result to problems on grievances, discipline and bullying. Relationships defined how well employees get on with their bosses, colleagues, or other people. At Creative Beauticians College, employees expressed having poor relationships with their managers. This was because there was an organizational structure requiring that only the immediate boss was responsible for any problems facing support staff and other employees. At HappyCare nursing home and HealthMatters health center, employees agreed that the top management was approachable for clarifications or verifications at any given time. Provision of medical services is sensitive, and consultation is the key to high quality and precise services.
Role
When an employee does not know what is expected of them, the levels of anxiety about their work and the organizations they are working for is high. There were high stress levels in employees at Creative Beauticians. Both the clerical and support staff did not have a permanent way of job to engage. The support staff claimed they were engaged in one or new task each day. Anxiety levels increased as one was not aware of the tasks they would be required to accomplish and how these tasks were related to the organizational goals. For instance, the messenger also prepared tea at ten in the morning and four in the evening. The messenger would also serve as the receptionist at one time or the other. These conflicting roles resulted to the creation of anxiety. Support and clerical staff had clearly defined job descriptions at HappyCare and HealthMatters. In fact, employees expressed devotion, responsibility and high productivity.
Change
Change is a leading source of uncertainty and insecurity within an organization. This implies that change must be effectively managed. When change occurs within an organization, there is the alteration in routines and can make the future uncertain for employers and employees. Change can cause massive turbulence within an organization especially with the threats of possible re-location and redundancies or re-adjustment like new office plan or corporate branding.
Chapter five: summary and conclusion of leading findings
The study has found out that work demands require employees to get the job right. Managers can effectively manage job stress through ensuring proper job design, employee training, and consider flexible working. Managers should ensure that job design contributes to producing a product or service among other things. In addition, employees’ best understand a job works when they understand organizational workflow since they understand causes of bottlenecks and patterns of work that improve productivity or save on work time. Job designs should not be rigid. Instead, they should be monitored regularly to make sure that they fit any personnel or workload changes. In the case of needed support, managers must ensure that there is proper and effective support to ensure that people in a given job design offer their best. When a person’s ability mismatches with the job requirements, the result is job stress in employees. This can be eliminated through the use of excellent training such that a person can effectively perform their job. Job training should be timely, and only the right methods of training should be used. In order to meet job demands in a stress free way, organizations should consider adapting flexible working. This way, organizations will produce goods of the right quality and prices at the time when customers need them. Flexible working includes flexitime, parttime working, job sharing, staggered hours and homeworking. This is important in maximizing the available labor, increasing productivity, reducing absenteeism, increasing employees’ commitment and elevating the ability of an organization to handle change.
In order to increase employees’ control, employers can encourage employees’ feedback and involvement in decision making, establish effective teams and reviewing employees’ performance. Performance reviewing identifies strengths and weaknesses for use in establishing personal objectives and training to meet them. Employees’ involvement in decision making makes use of workforce talent thereby generating better ideas. This results to increased employees motivation, stress reduction and improve performance. Employees’ involvement can also result to the establishment of trust through the encouragement of a culture of open expression and regular dialogue. Employees’ involvement can occur through daily chats, emails, newsletters or team meetings; face to face meetings of groups or teams, consultations, and employees’ representative in organizational committees. Employees’ performance review allows them to know their work standards and assisting them to become better.
Managers should offer support to their employees though talking about stressors, providing sympathetic ear, and openly providing information. Discussions on stressors can be held in regular meetings where employees discuss stressful situations and address underlying problems. In addition, such meetings can be used to identify possible stressors prior to their emergence. In most of the organizational meetings, managers can consider adding stress causes as part of their agenda. The responsibility of identifying stress should also be delegated to every employee who should learn how to recognize pressure and take necessary action. Managers and employees should be sympathetic in dealing with stress issues in order to allow employees to willingly admit their suffering. Other form of support should be provided through employee assistance programmes.
It is not always easy for employers to control relationships owing to personality clashes resulting to preferences of some work relationships over others. Managers should look for effective ways of handling grievances, delivering discipline, and handling undesirable behavior. For both employees and the managers, grievances and discipline can be very stressful. The best discipline and grievance policies should have a positive impact on stressful situations through offering clarity, fairness and understanding in problem resolution. Bullying and workplace harassment should be clearly defined as unacceptable behaviors.
All employees should be made to fully understand their role within the organization. Poor job description should be examined for causes such as poor induction, poor planning on accurate job descriptions, and organizational change. Employee induction should focus on general round up training, accepable reception, written statement of employment particulars, and an information pack. The main focus of induction should be on the individual such as minority, disability, fresh graduates or people returning to work. Change is an obvious cause of organizational stress. Managers must seek to plan ahead; consult and work together to identify possible problems involve employees in the introduction of new processes.
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