Managing Workplace Stress Workplace Stress

Managing Workplace Stress

Workplace stress is the intense tension that employees encounter at their workplaces when they receive extraordinary psychological or physical demands from their assigned task or their bosses. Most often, the employees adjust with different responses to this workplace stress depending with their personalities, to reduce the stress. When the stress escalates, the employees cannot continue normally with their work. They will always be affected unless they learn how to manage it. Some employees have lost their jobs in the past courtesy of the workplace stress. Their employers have mercilessly sucked employees, who were apparently under workplace stress, for their underperformance. Unfortunately, most employers do not care to research the causes of the underperformance of a given employee, when making the decision of layoff of nonperforming employees (Anderson, & Pulich, 2001, p.3).

Stress usually affects how people communicate depending on the stress encountered. Positive stress, which is experienced rarely at the workplace but its presence cannot be overruled completely, affects communication positively. A person under positive stress may tend to be happy and communicate well with other employees and the employer. However, negative stress, which is common at the workplace, will always affect communication negatively. An employee experiencing negative stress will tend to be unskillful, insensitive, and abrasive in their mode of communication. Consequently, distant, uncaring, and distrust starts developing between the relationships of the stressed person with the rest of his colleagues. Therefore, defective, incorrect information and restricted communication results from such a relationship. In this paper, the word "stress" will be acquired to refer to the negative stress experienced at the workplace since it is the most common and devastating in its effects (Bedeian, 1997, p.53).

There is an urgent need to manage workplace stress following is consequential terrible effects, which often works against an affected employee. Various possible ways can be employed to help manage the workplace stress. However, for effectiveness, these ways need joint efforts and collaboration between the affected employees and employers. Most workplace stress results from the job demands, role demands, and group demands at the work place. For instance, an employee will be stressed by work overload, change in systems of work, working with uncooperative colleagues, and demanding key roles in the organization (Wall & Callister, 1995, p.520).

Therefore, an employee must share genuine concerns about the working environment with the employer for the human resource manager to institute measures of managing the stress. The employer or human resource manager ought to listen keenly to the employee and assure him that the various concerns will be looked into and handled appropriately. After that, the employer should set up an audit of the work systems, inspecting the various mentioned causes of stress and other potential causes that have not yet manifested themselves. The audit results must be discussed in the board meeting of the given company for finding of appropriate solutions and effecting of necessary adjustments to the working environment.

For instance, stress due to the change of working systems is a problem caused by the employer. Therefore, it is the employer's duty to ensure that employee learn and adapt to the new systems or machines and be able to work stress-free to meet the demands for production from the company management. The employer should ensure that an employee has just enough work for the day and not an overloaded of work. This will enable the employee to cope up with the work environment and love his work. The employer is also obliged to the provision of break periods between the work process, to provide the employee some time for relaxing and refreshing. Therefore, the employer should also ensure that appropriate rest rooms and sanitation facilities are available for employees to relax when tired and respond to the nature calls when necessary (Bedeian, 1997, p.51).

However, despite the employer's role in stress management, the employee also needs to take responsibility of managing stress at the work environment. For instance, the employee needs to cultivate proper interpersonal relational skills, to relate appropriately with his colleagues at the work place. This will enhance the employee's team playing skills that will help bring the rest of the team members on board to work together. This will help reduce the possibilities of being stressed by the team members. Conflict, at the workplace, results from unmanaged stress, which is a byproduct of work demands for positive results. The demands for performance may be seen as the cause of conflicts at the work place. Therefore, an employee should have an ultimate goal of realizing positive results, to end any possible conflicts.