How to manage team stress?
8 July 2015
Read by 3231 persons
The return from holidays, refreshed and ready to start the new year, should be a time for reflection and good resolutions: it's time to start afresh with your teams and ensure they are in favorable conditions. How? By managing your own stress and thereby that of your teams. While stress can produce very quick results, 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 approach for a manager is therefore to help their team manage stress well.
Here are a few principles with two watchwords: listening and finesse. Detecting stress. To manage stress, you must know how to detect it. A useful way to understand the situation within your teams is to set up 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: uncertainty.
A factor that can take on alarming proportions when it affects employees' tasks or objectives. It is necessary to clearly define, within the teams, each person's tasks without overlap and without internal competition. The manager must find the line between emulation and perversion. For this, nothing better than a well-structured organizational chart with the setting of precise and achievable objectives. Managing 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 important. They must then be able to allow freedom and leeway, 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 The first reflex of a manager faced with a detected stress phenomenon in one of their collaborators: 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 case of collective stress, the manager must find the cause by organizing meetings or individual interviews, and trying to distinguish between private 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 likely to develop in companies. A practice with a double benefit that must take into account, at the same time, the personal and collective dimensions, and it is on this last point that managers have a key role to play by becoming stress regulators for their collaborators: allowing them freedom and leeway and simply trusting in how others walk. One foot, then the other...
Philippe Montant General Manager of ExeKutive.biz
Here are a few principles with two watchwords: listening and finesse. Detecting stress. To manage stress, you must know how to detect it. A useful way to understand the situation within your teams is to set up 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: uncertainty.
A factor that can take on alarming proportions when it affects employees' tasks or objectives. It is necessary to clearly define, within the teams, each person's tasks without overlap and without internal competition. The manager must find the line between emulation and perversion. For this, nothing better than a well-structured organizational chart with the setting of precise and achievable objectives. Managing 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 important. They must then be able to allow freedom and leeway, 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 The first reflex of a manager faced with a detected stress phenomenon in one of their collaborators: 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 case of collective stress, the manager must find the cause by organizing meetings or individual interviews, and trying to distinguish between private 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 likely to develop in companies. A practice with a double benefit that must take into account, at the same time, the personal and collective dimensions, and it is on this last point that managers have a key role to play by becoming stress regulators for their collaborators: allowing them freedom and leeway and simply trusting in how others walk. One foot, then the other...
Philippe Montant General Manager of ExeKutive.biz
