Many people find it difficult to manage their stress levels. If you’re a manager or you’re a business owner, you not only have to manage your stress levels; you also have to manage your team’s levels of stress. How do you deal with their discontentment, feelings of burnout and high anxiety levels?
Let’s be honest…
The workplace environment can be demanding – more so today than in times’ past. And, with so many people working in a 24/7 setting, it’s not uncommon to feel the stressed out or anxious. It can be difficult to stay engaged, creative and productive constantly.
The reality is that this fast-paced environment is unlikely to change anytime soon. Therefore, if you want to bring contentment and peace to your employees, you need to consider implementing an array of developmental activities that will help you and your employees to become resilient, engaging, and productive and a host of other important things for your business to succeed.
One way is to be some attention on the employees’ development and personal growth. It is entirely possible for managers to inspire a workforce to become productive, healthy and happy. And, the way they do this is to allow employees to be creative, reveal their potential and support their productivity.
Good news! There are several practical, easy-to-incorporate measures that will help boost personal development – and they don’t cost a lot, don’t take a plethora of resources and don’t require so much time being spent on them.
5 Key Methods That Can Instill Productivity in Your Employees
1.Give Employees Chances to Break Away from Work
The worst thing you can do is send work home with your employees. When your employees are forced to multi-task and work away from work, it can kill their creative spirit and slow down their productiveness. A huge problem in both small and large businesses are the employees’ inability to stop thinking about and doing work.
This “always thinking about working” mindset doesn’t take any recovery time into consideration. Everybody needs to take a break from their job – it doesn’t matter what profession they are in.
If you want your employees to be at their tip-top best – to always be productive and creative – you need to let them have time away from work. Don’t send emails out after a certain time or don’t send them work home on the weekends.
2.Train the Brain to Address the Stress
For your employees to be more productive and creative, consider training their brains to address their stress. With a little brain training, you help your employees to generate healthy mental habits that can increase their level of productivity – both in their work and social life. Employers who help their employees become more mindful about their health tend to work better together, deal with their stress levels in a more effective way and work harder.
3.Skip Multitasking
Forget everything you heard about multitasking, as it doesn’t work. Humans cannot think like a computer, and can’t multitask like a computer can. When a person attempts to multitask, it only causes them to spend more time on a task and leads to more mistakes.
Instead of forcing your employees to multitask, encourage them to mono-task – focus on one task at a time to ensure each project is done right the first time out. Don’t set up overlapping milestones. Most importantly, avoid the stickiness of confusing what is urgent and what is important.
4.Help Employees to Take A Break and Recharge
Productive employees must be encouraged to break away and recharge. If your business doesn’t allow for down cycles, create some downtime. Too often, employers want their employees thinking, eating and sleeping work. And, it’s this “always-on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace” thinking that leads to stress and anxiety and a loss of concentration and creativity.
5. People need to rejuvenate so they can refocus.
Work should not be treated like a marathon – who can get the most work done in this amount of time. Instead, it should be treated like a sprint. The most important factor is the work they do, not how many hours they spend working. Avoid falling into the trap of thinking quantity is more important than quality. Ask yourself if there is something you can do to help your employees do higher quality work in less.
Be Compassionate and Empathetic
A boss who is compassionate and empathetic toward their employees and contractors will have people who are willing to go above and beyond to help the business succeed. They’ll be more productive, focus intently on a job to ensure it’s done right and will regularly engage with one another and customers. This will lead to a better company bottom line.
If you listen to what your employees and contractors have to say – listen to their feedback, concerns, suggestions, etc. – you’re encouraging them to cooperate with you and with each other.
A leader who can be compassionate can understand people’s motivators, hopes and difficulties and develop the right support tools that enable them to be the best they can be. This will help in boosting the company’s productivity and profitability.
When you’re compassionate and sympathetic, it’s good for the company as well as your employees and contractors.
What could you expect for being compassionate and empathetic? Businesses, where the employees were emotionally engaged in the job, had higher earnings and did much better than companies who “worked their employees to death” and didn’t have high levels of engagement.
Is it your job as the manager to pay attention to your employees’ resilience and encourage them to break away from the “always-on” mindset? Absolutely! All companies would like it if their employees would leave their personal life at home but the reality is that it doesn’t happen. The things that go on away from work will affect how people react on the job. If you want the company to be successful, you must focus on their mental and emotional stamina.
Here’s what you need to understand – personal development will encourage everybody in the job to be more engaging and produce higher levels of service. If you want your business (and team) to succeed, you must encourage people to take a break from their jobs, so they’ll want to come back and do their jobs.
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