American workers are stressed and anxious—and who can blame them? We’re living in a volatile time, with 24/7 connectivity blurring the line between personal and professional life and the constant influx of new technology putting ever-greater demands on each worker.
When these stressors aren’t properly managed, and the pressure to produce value, look busy, or otherwise seem productive at work builds employees may find themselves mired in productivity anxiety.
In turn, productivity anxiety leads to burnout, high turnover, and increased absenteeism, undoing much of the time and effort spent boosting productivity to begin with. Fortunately, employers and their leadership teams are well-equipped to manage productivity anxiety, whether or not it’s taken hold.
In this article, we’ll review some realistic steps your business can take to curb this performance killer at your organization.
1. Set Clear Expectations & Encourage Work-life Balance
Uncertainty exacerbates anxiety. By providing clear guidance to your people and setting honest, realistic expectations, your leadership team can mitigate productivity anxiety. Making sure your people know that you value their time and wellbeing can go a long way toward curbing feelings that they must constantly overdo to break even.
Tips for Creating Realistic Expectations
- Ensure all job descriptions are concise and clear, with clear boundaries. Your people can more easily navigate their day-to-day stress-free if they know exactly what their responsibilities are.
- Provide clear instructions, and be prepared to answer questions. Managers should be providing detailed instructions for projects and tasks, while making themselves available to answer any questions that might arise.
- Understand your team’s strengths. By knowing each individual team member’s specific strengths and weaknesses, work can be assigned more effectively to ensure no one feels overwhelmed.
- Work with employees to break down larger projects into smaller, more manageable tasks. By setting smaller milestones, you’re creating a clearer path of progress and letting employees more easily access a sense of accomplishment.
Tips for Promoting Work-Life Balance
- Offer flexible schedule options to allow employees the autonomy to decide when and where they are able to do the best work they can.
- Respect personal time. When an employee is away – out sick, on vacation, or off the clock – they should not be expected to respond to work emails, calls, or texts from peers or managers.
- Encourage workers to take the rest they need – if your people feel they must burn the candle at both ends to succeed at work, they’re going to burn out. Policies like mandatory minimum time off can help alleviate this pressure, as can ensuring all employees have proper coverage, so that they aren’t left feeling like their workload is building into a mountain while they are away.
2. Embrace Open Communication
When employees feel comfortable discussing issues and confident that the feedback they receive is constructive, they will feel more at ease in their roles. Good, open communication practices, then, are essential to reducing workplace stress.
Here’s what managers can do:
- Embrace transparency and clarity when communicating. Avoid vagueness wherever possible, as it can seriously contribute to work stress. Concise, clear, and honest communication is absolutely crucial to fostering trust with employees.
- Stay connected. Managers should regularly have one-on-one check-ins with their people to discuss current projects and workloads and any difficulties they may be facing. If leadership is keeping its fingers on the pulse of work, issues can be caught and addressed before they become serious problems.
3. Support Your Employees’ Holistic Growth
Not everyone enters the workforce knowing how to best manage schedules and workloads, prioritize tasks, or fully unplug when necessary. Training and support can and should go beyond basic job skills and compliance—by setting your people up with the right resources, you’re saving them from going adrift.
- Ensure your people have what they need to succeed with a strong onboarding system and ongoing training and support. Employees must have all the tools and training necessary to perform their work duties.
- Expert coaches, like those at Sayge, can guide workers toward developing vital skills, from learning how to better manage their own specific workloads to building confidence in their work roles.
- Mentorship programs offer more informal and ongoing support, allowing junior employees to seek guidance from their more experienced colleagues.
- Offer training opportunities. Whether educational stipends or access to virtual employee training programs, embracing learning and development will make employees feel more valued and secure in their roles.
- Encourage collaboration. Cross-training, group work, and generally prioritizing collaboration over competition are all strategies worth trying. Connecting with peers is not merely a skill-developing tool, it can also build a sense of belonging, helping employees to feel more secure at work.
- Ensure access to mental health and wellness support. Access to mental health and wellness resources is absolutely crucial – such care is often prohibitively expensive without employer support. Whether you offer mental health benefits outright or through Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) or other methods, some sort of affordable access to counseling, support, and wellness education are must-haves.
- Celebrate and recognize both effort and success. Recognizing and rewarding proactive, positive effort goes a long way toward building a happier, more productive workforce.
4. Trust Your People
When employees have a healthy sense of autonomy, it can mean great things for your business – greater innovation, productivity, and engagement, for example. Ensuring your employees feel that their organization trusts them will help to reduce stress and productivity anxiety.
- Discourage micromanaging and encourage autonomy. Micromanaging is not an effective long-term management tactic—left unchecked, it can tank productivity and creativity and breed mistrust. Ensure your managers demonstrate that they trust the people on their teams and encourage them to regularly assess their own behavior.
- Empower employees to make their own decisions related to their roles. Putting a stop to micromanagement is just the first, you must also ensure that your people own their work and feel confident in making decisions in their roles without running everything by a manager.
- Do away with productivity monitoring tools. Remote and hybrid work environments may see surveillance as the key to ensuring productivity, but such software often actually leads to employees being more likely to break rules. Consider scaling back or eliminating digital tools like desktop activity monitors.
