If you talk about environmental stressors, workplaces are teeming with the worst of them. From white lights, to cubicle divisions, dozens of screens, piles of files and faxing sounds, they are full of stressors.
What makes it worse is that the work that employees are required to do as their daily agenda is no less tiring. From sheets and sheets of documents to fill and file; numbers to crunch; or word limits to meet, desk jobs can get extremely stressful. Staring at a screen all day or being buried in papers doesn’t help either.
The result is a domino effect of consequences on efficiency, mental health, physical wellbeing, absenteeism and ultimately worker productivity. Here are all the many ways in which work stress can directly impact workers’ productivity.
Bad Time Management
Stress is not always bad when it’s well within safe limits and is only pumping adrenaline for a much-needed boost. We all know how deadlines make us procrastinate less because of the stress. This means getting work done. However, the looming fear of not meeting the deadline can get exhausting.
It can aggravate into frustration and then panic. What usually took an hour to get done tops, will then take over 2 hours or even more. Instead, you’ll spend time calming yourself and catching your breath. The result will be not getting work down within the given time.
Strained Work Relationships
True; you as the manager may try to keep things cordial—even casual, at times—between you and your juniors. But there’s an unspoken rule that this relationship requires employees to produce desirable results and a satisfactory output by day’s end.
Failure to do so not only affects the employee’s record and future prospects, but also strains their relationship with their boss. However serious the situation may be, being incompetent regularly will earn you your employer’s disfavor. This can further become an added source of stress on top of the workload.
Lack of Focus
If you’re neck-deep in work—because of a backlog of corrections and new day’s agenda—it’s not hard to lose focus. Stress not only confounds your vision but also has a strain on your retention and ability to process new information.
The pressure to do better on any new project brews anxiety deep dow
n which often surfaces in the form of panic attacks, in a moment of weakness. This exponentially increases the chances of mistakes that you’ll make, which will cost the business a lot. If left untreated, work stress can even worsen into mental health problems that will definitely affect productivity.
If you want to have an active and efficient group of employees on board, that work diligently and produce results, you need to give them a breather.
Our picnic event planners Bay Area operate in the Bay Area and they can plan out a day full of stress-releasing team building activities Bay Area for your work force. Get in touch for a free quote today!
