HR Strategies for Managing Stress in the Workplace

Employees are the strength of any firm. Their performance is what determines the overall output of a company. So it is essential to keep the employees fresh and active all the time. This is not an easy task, in the fast-moving phase of the present day companies, with an extensive level of competition and ideas. Here,  the stress generally starts to hit employees sooner. This will not only affect the lower strata of the employee chain but bus also the top authorities.  Starting from the manager to the newbies among the firm, stress will hit everyone without sparing a single person at some moments of work life. 

Stress comes as a complicated term when we take the case of a working firm. Stress hits various individuals in various ways. In a workplace, some will be very good in diverting the stress factor and turning them to a  productive work. On the other hand, some will lose their good pace when stress hit them. There are also some other group of people who are not at all fit to perform tasks and when they are assigned or exposed to something out of their comfort zone.  They eventually go into stress mode. In a firm it is the duty of the HR to intelligently plan some strategies for maintaining the stress at the workplace, it is his/her duty to make ensure that employees are doing the assigned jobs fit and fine without the scope for errors due to stress. 

In this blog, we will go through some HR strategies for managing stress in the workplace.

Well-arranged work

This is very effective when it comes to stress management, the HR can give a proper schedule for the work which is going to be conducted by each employee. For this, the HR can study about the strong and weak points of each and every employee, in this way when a particular work or project arise the HR will have a clear idea about to whom this shall be assigned. Also, the companies which work on shifts can also make use of the HR strategies for stress management. Some persons will be active at night and will have no problems whatsoever to work at night while for someone this will be just the opposite. So to sort this behavior patterns and to arrange shifts accordingly can reduce a considerable amount of stress from employees. Thus managing stress is done.

Taking extreme care of issues

There will be many situations where employees are subjected to have issues with the company. The HR should take special care about these kinds of issues at the starting stage itself to avoid stress hitting both the firm and the employees as well. The strategies for maintaining stress, in this case, including trying to know about the issue, find a solution for it, execute it etc. If goes unnoticed this can be deadly since the cold war between the employee and firm will finally end in the termination of the employee and huge loss for the firm. So HR strategies should be used in this case.

Smart time management for employees

In almost all the firms there will be a time bound for employees to finish their work. One of the major contributors to the stress at the workplace is this. If at all,  the employees feel that they cannot finish their work within the given time interval they will go panic. This is not going to benefit the firm or the employee. So for managing stress, the HR should provide smart time bounds. This doesn’t mean he should provide the employee a huge time gap to finish his job, but according to the skill level of the employee, the time gap shall be set smartly.

Workload management

Heavy workloads are another case of building up of stress in employees. What is Strategic Human Resource Management?. The HR should always track the working status of the employees and find out how comfortable is he with his work. If an employee is not taking leave for a long time or doing overtime continuously, it will be because of the workload he will be suffering. So the HR should address such issues and discuss with the employee and find out what is going on and use strategies for managing stress.

Feel free atmosphere development

There should always be space for an employee to discuss his problem with the HR. He should not have any intimidating feeling to talk about his issue. If he can’t discuss his issue with anyone means stress is surely going to hit him. So the HR should plan strategies so as to maintain stress in the workplace in such a way that the employees should feel free to address their issues.

Empathy approach

There will be a lot of cases where an employee tends to work poorly. This may not be only because of the lazy nature and reasons for such. So being aggressive is not the final solution to solve this matter. The underperformance may be due to a lot of reasons like family problems, diseases etc. So the HR should find the root cause of the issue for managing the stress of the employee in the empathy showing way.

Fun time activities

This is a good strategy for managing stress in the workplace. The HR can arrange small fun time activities and games which can give some relaxation to the employees from work life and refresh their minds.

It is essential to have a stress free workplace to churn out the maximum potential from the employees for the proper functioning of a firm. For making these possible HR strategies for managing stress can be used.