How to manage team stress?
12 June 2014
Read by 2715 persons
The return from holidays, refreshed and ready to start the new school year, should be a time for awareness and good resolutions: it's time to start afresh with your teams and ensure they are in favorable conditions. How? By regulating your own stress and thereby that of your teams.
Stress can produce very quick results, but it can also be a source of conflict and very quickly lead to demotivation and a significant drop in efficiency.
In the long term, the best course of action for a manager is therefore to help their team manage stress well. Here are a few principles with two watchwords: listening and subtlety.
Detecting stress
To manage stress, you need to know how to detect it. A useful way to understand the situation within your teams is to put in place a questionnaire, for example, allowing employees to express the positive and negative points they feel in their work.
Observation is also a very useful stress detector, especially as the symptoms are numerous: physical, physiological, moral, psychological, relational, intellectual or professional.
Setting up an "anti-stress" organization
Another major stress factor is uncertainty. This factor can take on alarming proportions when it affects employees' tasks or objectives.
It is necessary to clearly define, within the teams, the tasks of each person without overlap and without internal competition. The manager must find the line between emulation and perversion. For this, nothing is better than a well-structured organizational chart with the implementation of precise and achievable objectives.
Regulating stress on a daily basis
On a daily basis, the manager must above all be attentive to the slightest sign of stress in their collaborators in order to regulate the problem before it becomes significant.
They must then be able to allow freedom and room for maneuver, delegate responsibilities and transmit information. This is to allow the employee to better take into account the tasks they have to perform, and therefore to take responsibility, or even take initiatives. An essential quality to maintain is therefore listening.
Managing individual and collective stress
A manager's first reflex in the face of detected stress in one of their collaborators is to be available and attentive. If the stress has a personal origin and endangers the employee's health, the manager must direct them towards medical care.
In the event of collective stress, the manager must seek the cause by holding meetings or individual interviews, and trying to separate personal and professional life. The ideal is then to act on these causes. Here, the manager must be proactive: if certain problems are identified, action is necessary. For if they fail to act, the manager risks in turn fueling this collective stress.
In conclusion, stress management does exist. It is even a practice that is set to develop in companies. A dual relaxation practice that must take into account both the personal and collective dimensions, and it is on this last point that managers have a key role to play in becoming stress regulators for their collaborators: giving them freedom and room for maneuver and simply trusting in how others walk. One foot, then the other...
Philippe Montant
General Manager of ReKrute
Stress can produce very quick results, but it can also be a source of conflict and very quickly lead to demotivation and a significant drop in efficiency.
In the long term, the best course of action for a manager is therefore to help their team manage stress well. Here are a few principles with two watchwords: listening and subtlety.
Detecting stress
To manage stress, you need to know how to detect it. A useful way to understand the situation within your teams is to put in place a questionnaire, for example, allowing employees to express the positive and negative points they feel in their work.
Observation is also a very useful stress detector, especially as the symptoms are numerous: physical, physiological, moral, psychological, relational, intellectual or professional.
Setting up an "anti-stress" organization
Another major stress factor is uncertainty. This factor can take on alarming proportions when it affects employees' tasks or objectives.
It is necessary to clearly define, within the teams, the tasks of each person without overlap and without internal competition. The manager must find the line between emulation and perversion. For this, nothing is better than a well-structured organizational chart with the implementation of precise and achievable objectives.
Regulating stress on a daily basis
On a daily basis, the manager must above all be attentive to the slightest sign of stress in their collaborators in order to regulate the problem before it becomes significant.
They must then be able to allow freedom and room for maneuver, delegate responsibilities and transmit information. This is to allow the employee to better take into account the tasks they have to perform, and therefore to take responsibility, or even take initiatives. An essential quality to maintain is therefore listening.
Managing individual and collective stress
A manager's first reflex in the face of detected stress in one of their collaborators is to be available and attentive. If the stress has a personal origin and endangers the employee's health, the manager must direct them towards medical care.
In the event of collective stress, the manager must seek the cause by holding meetings or individual interviews, and trying to separate personal and professional life. The ideal is then to act on these causes. Here, the manager must be proactive: if certain problems are identified, action is necessary. For if they fail to act, the manager risks in turn fueling this collective stress.
In conclusion, stress management does exist. It is even a practice that is set to develop in companies. A dual relaxation practice that must take into account both the personal and collective dimensions, and it is on this last point that managers have a key role to play in becoming stress regulators for their collaborators: giving them freedom and room for maneuver and simply trusting in how others walk. One foot, then the other...
Philippe Montant
General Manager of ReKrute
