How to Help your Team beat Workplace Stress
Posted by Raja Kreshnaswamy on April 30, 2015
Category Companies / Co-workers
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 Appreciate people’s work/life balance and embrace flexible working. The days of Monday to Friday 9 to 5 are gone and they’re not coming back. And you’ll never get anyone to perform at 100% if their body is in the office while their mind is at the Nativity Play or Sports Day. We try to be as flexible as possible at Castle – and it absolutely pays dividends.

Choose the right people: one of the great skills of recruitment is putting a team together – so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. You see it in sport and you see it in business: give me a team that gels over a collection of individuals every day of the week. So whether we’re recruiting for ourselves or recommending a candidate to a client, one of the key questions we’ll always ask is ‘will this person fit with the rest of the team?’

Read a book – back to Southern California and of course all offices should have a dedicated play room with the latest video games, exercise equipment and multi-colored bean bags. Could I suggest a simpler alternative? A quiet space with a few books and magazines. Creating a ‘library’ for the office doesn’t take any more work than asking everyone to bring in a few paperbacks they’ve finished with: and it’ll be interesting to see who brings the well-thumbed copy of 50 Shades…

Meditation: I’m absolutely convinced that one of the biggest uses of our phones will ultimately be in monitoring our health, and I referred to a running/walking app in a previous post. But it’s not all about exercise, meditation doesn’t work for everyone, but some of your team may find that it really helps.

Finally – and this is right at the heart of everyone’s work/life balance, respect their privacy. If you want to read about a spectacular management own goal, read this story about an American law firm – a ‘joke’ that will have made a few employees start polishing their CVs. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that staffs are becoming more protective of their downtime and a successful employer will respect that. We all want to lie on the beach without thinking of the office – I included!

I hope those ideas help. Yes, we all work in competitive industries and we all have deadlines and targets. But we’re not going to meet them if key members of our teams are suffering from stress, anxiety or depression.

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