The cost of not managing stress in the workplace

An online business might consider its website or its brand to be its most important asset. It is vital to look after these, but it is equally important to look after your staff. How long would it take for you to replace and train your current staff if they left? Taking care of your staff will not only make them want to stay around longer, but can also make them more effective and happier works.

When you run an office or a business you want to make sure that the staff you employ are doing all they can to look after your business. So you implement the meetings, supervision, appraisals to assess if they are achieving the vital key performance targets you’ve set to ensure your business is ticking over and growing. What else do you provide that shows your staff that they are valued?

Being valued enables individuals to want to dig down deep and even use their own resources to give something back to you because they are happy and feel cared for. Valuing your staff does not have to be a costly experience and can be shown in so many ways. It can be as little as responding to ensure that the environment they work in is clean, safe, vibrant, enjoyable and happy or to ensure that they are developing by investing in their training to keep their knowledge and skills abreast of the market competitors or simply by taking your team out for a meal and a social get together.

If you have a business which is suffering from high staff absentee rates due to sickness like stress or the morale tends to be low across company, it’s likely that you’ve managed to create a situation where your staff team are suffering from ‘the feeling of being undervalued’ in one way or another. If this is the culture running across the company then it cannot be great for business. This has got to be costing you to throw money directly down the drain instead of investing it back into the company. Your probably paying out for more staff cover to replace the absent employees, plus paying sickness leave for your employees. The same goes for the high turnover in staffing verses recruitment costs.

Have you stopped to take an assessment? What will motivate your staff to change? What do you need to do to change? How much of these costs in waste can be reduced? If you don’t change, this could ultimately damage the image, reputation and brand of your company or if you do change could move the company into achieving beyond the key performance that it had set itself for the year ahead.

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This guest post was written by Malakh, who runs a team of London-based mobile health therapists, who is available to help businesses become more effective by reducing workplace stress. Her theropies also work as a great incentive or reward for employees. If you are interested in learning more, contact Malakh on info@zebulun.co.uk.