91% Of UK Employees Face Workplace Stress: Is Your Company Contributing To The Crisis?

4 Strategies To Combat Workplace Stress

To tackle the epidemic of workplace stress, you need to implement strategies that promote a healthier and supportive environment.

By taking action, you can help to reduce stress levels and create a happy, positive work environment. Here are four actionable strategies to take into consideration:

1. Revamp Your Employee Benefits

You can take a proactive approach to tackling workplace stress by introducing benefits, such as:

• Employee Assistance Programs (EAP): EAPs provide staff with tools and services to manage stress, among other things
• Mental health support: Mental health services give staff access to support and counselling (Benefits such as Group Health Insurance & Group Income Protection often offer this type of support as a free additional benefit)
• Corporate Health Cash Plans: Health Cash Plans support the overall wellbeing of employees, allowing them to cover part of the costs of treatments
• Wellness apps: Stress management is key, and wellness apps can help provide necessary support in times of high stress
• Flexible working options: Allowing staff to work flexibly enables them to create a healthy work-life balance and combat stress.

Provide Benefits That Help Combat Cause Of Stress

With financial worries and family issues adding to employee stress outside of work, consider introducing benefits that alleviate these pressures too.

Implementing supportive benefits can significantly reduce overall stress, leading to a happier, healthier workforce. Think about offering things such as:

• Discounts scheme
  Discount schemes can help an employee’s monthly income go further by giving them access to thousands of retail discounts
• Good workplace pension
  This can alleviate worries they have about their financial future. Plus, 60% of employees said they’d actually take enhanced pension contributions over other benefits
• Insurance policies that protect their loved ones
  With a fifth of the workforce wanting core protection products, having insurance in place can help reduce some family worries. Employees have peace of mind that financially their family would be taken care of if they were to pass away or be unable to work due to sickness or injury.

Company-paid insurance policies often come with free extra benefits, such as virtual GP services, counselling, meditation sessions, and Employee Assistance Programmes (EAP).

These services can help your employees and their loved ones with managing their stress levels.

Nadeem Farid
Head of Health & Wellbeing Benefits

2. Improve Communications

A significant reason for stress is a lack of good, effective communication. If tasks aren’t properly communicated, mistakes and misunderstandings occur, which generally result in stress for employees.

You can improve how you communicate by:

• Being clear and direct with instructions
• Understanding communication styles
• Ensuring you listen to your team.

It’s not only about improving how you communicate, but about the culture you create around communication. It’s important to develop an environment where employees are confident in voicing concerns or asking for help. After all, a problem shared is a problem halved, which leads perfectly to our next suggestion.

3. Effectively Manage Workloads

Unmanageable workloads are a stressor for employees. And if ignored can lead to employee burnout. Your team is only human, and it’s easy for workloads to become too much.

Your management team should oversee team workloads and ensure priorities are made clear. This can help your employees to handle their workload effectively themselves.

Delegating tasks to those with more availability can help to reduce stress, so it’s important to assess each employee’s workload. If someone has too much on their plate, can you delegate any of these to better manage task allocation?

4. Promote A Healthy Work-Life Balance

As our survey shows, 40% of employees stress about work even when they aren’t there. Employers have a responsibility to ensure their employees aren’t heading for burnout due to unhealthy work practices. Promoting a healthy work-life balance helps to alleviate stress. You can do this by:

• Encouraging regular breaks
  Ensure employees take breaks to recharge
• Allowing remote work
  Give staff the flexibility to work from home or a different location
• Promoting healthy living
  Offer benefits like Cycle To Work schemes and gym membership discounts
• Focusing on productivity
  Emphasise work outcomes rather than hours worked
• Reviewing annual leave policies
  Ensure employees take their full leave
• Setting boundaries
  Insist employees don’t check emails outside working hours
• Leading by example
  Don’t stay late in the office or answer emails at night.

Stress-Free Benefits With Drewberry

A solid benefits package with wellness perks is a fantastic way to keep employees engaged and motivated. It shows appreciation for their hard work by offering them something meaningful – beyond their payslip.

But setting up and maintaining a competitive employee benefits package requires a decent bit of admin, which quickly becomes time consuming. We do the heavy lifting for you, giving you more time to focus on what matters.

We live and breathe employee benefits, doing this day in-day out for businesses just like yours. Looking at the big picture, we get to know your unique workforce and benchmark your offering against competitors.

Best of all? We have access to the most competitive rates on the market for core benefits, such as Group Life Insurance, Group Health Insurance, and Group Critical Illness Cover. Give us a call on 02074425880 or email help@drewberry.co.uk.

Why Speak to Us?

We started Drewberry™ because we were tired of being treated like a number.

We all deserve a first class service when it comes to things as important as protecting our health and our finances. Below are just a few reasons why it makes sense to talk to us.

• We are award winning 🏆 independent insurance advisers who work with all the leading UK insurers
• You’ll speak to a dedicated expert from start to finish
• We are very proud of the 3900 and growing independent client reviews rating us at 4.92 / 5
• We are authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. You can find us on the financial services register here 🧐
• Claims support when you need it most.