Workplace Stress – How To Reduce Your Stress ?
Did you know that workplace stress alone costs companies an estimated $80 billion per annum? And that’s no wonder, since absenteeism, lower productivity, low employee turnover, or accidents are the common aftermaths of workplace stress. Not to mention the medical, legal or insurance costs companies incur due to their stressed out employees.
The NSC (National Safety Council) recently found that around a million employees, on a typical working day, remain absent due to their stress-related problems. And around 40% of our natural worker turnover is lost because of job related stresses. A study found that, job stresses persist because companies fail to solve or realize the following top 10 common reasons behind your workplace stresses.
- Too heavy workload
- Random interruptions
- Confronted new rules and uncertainty
- Mistrust & unfairness
- Vague policies with little sense of direction
- Ambiguity in career and job
- Lack of feedback – good or bad
- Zero appreciation
- Ineffective communications
- Lack of control over things that affect you negatively
And it was found that an estimated $13,000 is lost by a company to replace a stressed out employee. On the other hand, 60 to 80% of the on-the-job catastrophes are stress-related. For a company, even more alarming news is that, workers’ compensation awards related to workplace stress have literally skyrocketed in the past 2 decades. Would you believe a double digit hike in premium?
As said by CNN-Money.com, average Americans spend over $17 billion to buy anti-depressants or anti-anxiety drugs. According to another research institute, American industries end up spending over $26 billion every year to handle their medical bills or disability payments. And they spend another $10 billion on the lost workdays, hospitalization or deaths of employees. Needless to say, the researchers account all these to job related stresses.
And apart from such staggering figures, job stresses are known to taking serious tolls through all the extra expenses companies need to bear for the added quality control and legal challenges. Same goes for lost opportunities, substandard performance, and hostile attitudes. And it is also imaginable how much these companies are spending on behavioral training alone!
If you’re part of the society, you know how problematic workplace stress can get. It harms your earning, career development and reputation. And most of all, you end up loosing the confidence you always want to uphold. And stress is hard to curb, as it is the part of human system. We are born with it as a part of our defense system that allows us to cope with the challenges of the environment we live in. And it is a far wiser strategy to focus on the sources of the job stress rather than wrestling with the job stress itself.
Fasten your seatbelt and get to work for solving the sources of the workplace stresses you are undergoing.
