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In times of high pressure, aspirational core values can seem entirely impractical. Who has time for being “bold,” “innovative” or “connected” when they’re slammed by a barrage of emails and threatened by volatility or disruption?
In these situations, values are relegated to vinyl stickers on an office wall or words tucked away on the About Us page of a website. How many people can recall their company’s values, never mind using them as a blueprint for decision-making and the basis for team alignment and trust?…..Story continues….
By Bradley Hook
Source: How to Activate and Align Your Values When Under Pressure | Entrepreneur
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All of us have some position in society, in the workplace, within the family, economic status and so on. Unfortunately, most of us are unwilling to accept where we are. Instead, we wish we were somewhere else, usually at a higher position. Managing that stress becomes vital in order to keep up job performance as well as relationship with co-workers and employers. For some workers, changing the work environment relieves work stress.
Making the environment less competitive between employees decreases some amounts of stress. Companies and businesses tend to be more successful when the work environment facilitates more cooperation rather than competition. In this type of environment people feel more comfortable and capable of completing the work that needs to be done because they are able to find support from coworkers and employers.
As a result, both companies and employees benefit from that. Competition in the workplace can leave employees feeling like it is “every man for himself” which can increase stress. Author J, Carr highlighted three areas of the workplace that affects the levels of stress experienced which are: Job demands, individual differences, and social demands. These areas that heighten stress are addressed in Rahe’s scale suggesting that some of the greatest stressors in life are connected to the workplace.
That said, stress in the workplace does not always have to be negatively viewed. When managed well, stress can increase employees’ focus and productivity. According to the Yerkes–Dodson law, stress is beneficial to human functioning, but only up to a point. People who experience too low levels of stress might feel understimulated and passive; people experiencing stress that are at excessively high levels would feel overwhelmed, anxious, and irritable. Thus, establishing an optimum level of stress is key.
Organizational stress levels that an individual faces is dependent not just on external factors such as job characteristics or environment, but also on intrapersonal factors such as personality, temperament, and individual coping and thinking styles. Both aspects need to be managed well. Also, stress at workplace is not limited to employees. Entrepreneurs also undergo stress This stress can vary from team management, business management or unfavorable policy from the government.
Some examples of stressors in the workplace can be their perception of Organization Commitment, which is the way an employee conceptualizes his/her reasons for staying in the organizations for either Affective, Continuance, or Normative reasons. Affective commitment to the organization is ideal, as it is the situation where an employee strongly identifies with the values and culture of the organization.
While this is not directly telling of an employee’s stress levels, genuine interest and enjoyment in the employee’s work and work relations places the employee in a good position to manage stress well. Employees who stay in an organization for continuance reasons stay as a result of weighing the pros and cons, and then decides that the opportunity cost of leaving the organization is too high.
Employees under this category might experience moderate levels of stress, as their reasons for staying is driven more by external rather than internal motivation. Employees who stay for normative reasons, however, are most likely to experience the highest levels of stress, as these are the employees who stay out of obligation and duty. Salary can also be an important concern of employees. Salary can affect the way people work because they can aim for promotion and in result, a higher salary. This can lead to chronic stress.
Cultural differences have also shown to have some major effects on stress coping problems. Eastern Asian employees may deal with certain work situations differently from how a Western North American employee would. In a study conducted in Malaysia, it was found that while the classification of workplace stress is similar between Malaysians and Western employees, the perception of workplace stress as well as the approaches to coping with stress were different.
In order to manage stress in the workplace, employers can provide stress managing programs such as therapy, communication programs, and a more flexible work schedule. There have been many studies conducted demonstrating the benefits of mindfulness practices on subjective well-being and work outcomes. Productivity, organization, and performance increase, while burnout rates decrease.
Many businesses today have begun to use stress management programs for employees who are having trouble adapting to stress at the workplace or at home. Some companies provide special equipments adapting to stress at the workplace to their employees, like coloring diaries and stress relieving gadgets. Many people have spill over stress from home into their working environment. There are a couple of ways businesses today try to reduce the stress levels of their employees.
One way is through individual intervention. This starts off by monitoring the stressors in the individual. After monitoring what causes the stress, next is attacking that stressor and trying to figure out ways to alleviate them in any way. Developing social support is vital in individual intervention, being with others to help you cope has proven to be a very effective way to avoid stress. Avoiding the stressors altogether is the best possible way to get rid of stress but that is very difficult to do in the workplace.
Changing behavioral patterns, may in turn, help reduce some of the stress that is put on at work as well. Employee assistance programs can include in-house counseling programs on managing stress. Evaluative research has been conducted on EAPs that teach individuals stress control and inoculation techniques such as relaxation, biofeedback, and cognitive restructuring. Studies show that these programs can reduce the level of physiological arousal associated with high stress.
Participants who master behavioral and cognitive stress-relief techniques report less tension, fewer sleep disturbances, and an improved ability to cope with workplace stressors. Another way of reducing stress at work is by simply changing the workload for an employee, or even giving them more control as to when or where they work. Some may be too overwhelmed that they have so much work to get done, or some also may have such little work that they are not sure what to do with themselves at work.
Improving communications between employees also sounds like a simple approach, but it is very effective for helping reduce stress. Sometimes making the employee feel like they are a bigger part of the company, such as giving them a voice in bigger situations shows that you trust them and value their opinion. Having all the employees mesh well together is a very underlying factor which can take away much of workplace stress.
If employees fit well together and feed off of each other, the chances of much stress are minimal. Lastly, changing the physical qualities of the workplace may reduce stress. Changing things such as the lighting, air temperature, odor, and up to date technology. Intervention is broken down into three steps: primary, secondary, tertiary. Primary deals with eliminating the stressors altogether. Secondary deals with detecting stress and figuring out ways to cope with it and improving stress management skills.
Finally, tertiary deals with recovery and rehabbing the stress altogether. These three steps are usually the most effective way to deal with stress not just in the workplace, but overall. Aviation is a high-stress industry, given that it requires a high level of precision at all times. Chronically high stress levels can ultimately decrease the performance and compromise safety.
To be effective, stress measurement tools must be specific to the aviation industry, given its unique working environment and other stressors. Stress measurement in aviation seeks to quantify the psychological stress experienced by aviators, with the goal of making needed improvements to aviators’ coping and stress management skills. To more precisely measure stress, aviators’ many responsibilities are broken down into “workloads.” This helps to categorize the broad concept of “stress” by specific stressors.
Additionally, since different workloads may pose unique stressors, this method may be more effective than measuring stress levels as a whole. Stress measurement tools can then help aviators identify which stressors are most problematic for them, and help them improve on managing workloads, planning tasks, and coping with stress more effectively. To evaluate workload, a number of tools can be used. The major types of measurement tools are:
Performance-based measures; Subjective measures, like questionnaires which aviators answer themselves; and Physiological measures, like measurement of heart rate. Implementation of evaluation tools requires time, instruments for measurement, and software for collecting data.
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