Work stress has become a common denominator for employees around the world, some wearing it as a distorted badge of honor, and others crippling under its weight. While stress can be helpful at times to meet a tight deadline or accomplish a specific goal, ongoing negative stress in the workplace is detrimental to your staff and organization in the long run.
To avoid staff burnout, implement a proactive, intentional approach of creating a less stressful work environment. By setting the appropriate tone as part of your company culture, your teams can reduce stress and embrace the workday with a more positive, ambitious demeanor. These 5 tips can help leaders de-stress the workplace:
1) Build the right team
Hiring a balanced combination of individuals with the appropriate mix of skillsets, strengths, and complementary personality traits that suit your organization’s needs and culture is the foundation of a low-stress workplace. The right fit in the right roles means leadership can maximize their teams’ abilities in a comfortable, non-threatening environment where everyone can thrive.
2) Simplify your resource management practices
Keeping track of hundreds of resources and their respective projects can bring about a wealth of stressors on its own. Avoid losing your grip on necessary staffing needs across your portfolio by investing in resource management software. Tools in the marketplace today offer integrated, user-friendly platforms that house all resource management functions in one place – from timesheets to multi-year capacity planning.
3) Plan ahead
Forecasting capacity needs and preparing for potential challenges are two great ways to beat stress before it starts. Utilize tools that have the ability to access your organization’s real-time data to brainstorm, hypothesize, and test staffing scenarios by manipulating different project factors like budget, deadlines, and skillsets. By mapping out these options and possibilities ahead of time, you can be better equipped to complete projects on time and under budget with minimal surprises along the way.
4) Offer flexible work schedules
How people spend the 24 hours in their day is looking increasingly less like a traditional schedule and shifting into a breakdown that suits both their lifestyle and 24/7 business operations. Although flextime may not be feasible for some industries, leaders should embrace this model when it makes sense for their company. While the same goals, deadlines, and expectations should remain intact, this flexibility gives employees more freedom and independence. Today’s software tools can assist with creating sample resource models of what flextime schedules could look like and how they can maximize company productivity.
5) Communicate
Fewer things are more stressful for employees than not being in the know. Whether it be project goals, changes to project circumstances, or management’s expectations, it is leadership’s responsibility to develop policies and practices that allow for effective two-way communication. Create a workplace culture that encourages staff feedback, suggestions, and idea sharing company-wide to ensure all voices are heard and respected.
Stress less with Tempus Resource
The leader in resource management software, Tempus Resource takes the stress off companies struggling to juggle the complex challenges of tracking, reporting, and forecasting their capacity needs. Tempus’ unique one-stop shop for all things resource management provides a streamlined, easy-to-use platform accessible to multiple users in multiple locations.
Tempus Resource’s cloud-based system puts an end to outdated, error-ridden spreadsheets with live, up-to-date data entry features. Polished, drag-and-drop report building and a first-of-its-kind What-if Analysis tool that gives companies the ability to conduct capacity scenarios based on their current data simplifies important functions of a successful resource management operation.
Tempus Resource was built to work for its customers and is always looking for more ways to make the work day easier, more efficient, and less stressful. To learn more about how Tempus Resource can serve your organization’s specific needs, contact us today.
