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Imagine coming home from work and relaxing by listening to your favorite podcast. Your phone will ring and display an email out of your boss. They want you to renovate the slide deck. Instead of resting, you spend the evening working and the next day you come to work fried.
We’ve all experienced this sort of microstress, a term I coined with my co-author, Karen Dillon, in our recent book,Microstress effectMicro-stressors are small but stressful moments that overall harm our health, performance at work and personal life. Data indicates that these small negative interactions have as much as five times more impact than positive ones.
Highly stressful events trigger our brain’s fight-or-flight mode, a response that helps us discover and cope with stress. However, microstressors are so small that our brains don’t all the time notice them, regardless that our bodies produce stress hormones reminiscent of cortisol. Research suggests that microstressors may accumulate in our body. Our brains then pick up on the proven fact that something is fallacious, but not all the time knowing what is responsible mood.
Microstress helps explain why employees are so burnt out. How professor at Babson College who has been studying the workplace for many years, I consider that each company must address microstress if it wants to cut back burnout and increase productivity. Here are 3 ways to cut back stress in your organization.
Reject “difficult”
High performers are used to facing challenges. Make the next deadline, persuade yourself that every part will calm down after that point, and repeat when the next deadline comes up. But nobody can work in a continuing rush without sacrifice. I’ve talked to some executives who’ve built their approach to enormous wealth at the cost of multiple divorces and broken relationships with their children.
Perseverance also involves the false assumption that working longer and harder means doing higher. This isn’t all the time true. My tests indicates that we spend as much as 85% of our time on teamwork – from briefings, through project meetings, to the cooperation of all employees and more. We can reduce this time and increase efficiency by being more intentional and effective in collaboration.
Reject a culture of rigorous performance in favor of one which focuses on working smarter. It’s also essential to keep in mind that burnt-out employees are less prone to innovate and more prone to leave their jobs.
Identify and eliminate microstress through team interventions
Messages from the top signal organizational priorities. However, the best place to cope with microstress is at the team level.
I recently worked with a bunch of employees on the issue of microstress. Every Monday, employees would email me describing a brand new microstressor they desired to deal with that week. Perhaps a friend was asking for an excessive amount of help with projects. Maybe their boss kept changing expectations. Perhaps family responsibilities were causing an excessive amount of pressure. On Fridays, they’d send me updates on their progress in coping with the microstressor.
Over the course of three weeks, I only noticed gradual movements. But by week 4, employees began to see how controlling microstressors could have a big effect on their lives. There are three essential conclusions from these experiments:
First, awareness of microstress may help us resolve it. Employees need examples, a listing they’ll have a look at and say, “Oh yes, I know that feeling!” In my work we used the “Microstress Effect” appwhich catalogs various sources of microstress.
Second, because microstress is made up of dozens of little things, don’t try to unravel it suddenly. Reducing stress shouldn’t cause more stress. Take your micro-stressors one after the other and start with the easier one – not the most impactful one – to build momentum.
Third, microstress must be addressed at the team level. Team members should come together in groups to generate ideas for actions to cut back microstress, and build accountability by keeping one another updated on their progress. This team structure also recognizes that we is usually a source of micro-stress to others and that the only way we are able to communicate about our stress is in a supportive, open environment.
Be proactive, set recent norms and change the culture
Too often, it’s easier to soak up micro-stress than to do something about it. If you’ve ever avoided an uncomfortable conversation – regardless that avoiding it led to lingering stress – you know what it’s like. However, micro-stress accumulates in a way that’s devastating to our well-being, so it is vital to remain proactive. A really effective step in the fight against microstress is change culture to avoid stressful moments.
In one exercise I do with firms, we list collaboration tools in a single column, from video chat to easy messaging to email. The second column focuses on positive ways to make use of these tools. In the third column, we brainstorm the usage standards we would really like to enhance.
Take email for instance, one in every of the most typical causes of microstress. Employees often feel like they’re drowning in emails that take too long to read and reply to. In the future, the team may agree to jot down emails only in bullet points to prioritize brevity.
Some people may think that is silly. Who has time to establish systems for mutual email communication? When we are in constant firefighting mode, we are too busy to think about improving systems. But improving these systems and changing the culture isn’t why we’re so busy. Just a few hours of proactive work can now save tons of of hours and prevent micro-stresses.
Microstress may be harmful to you, your team, and your organization. Stressors could seem minor, but that does not make them any less essential. So stop reinforcing it. Encourage teams to discover and eliminate microstress. And then work together to generate recent norms and change the culture.