Stress is important, either personally or as a responsibility of any manager. The impact of stress on work performance can be significant. But what are the main causes of stress?
Research indicates the main causes of stress are workload 46%, people issues 28%, juggling work/personal issues 20%, lack of job security 6%.
Research has also shown significantly, that jobs are not necessarily stressful, but the job/person relationship is key, more on this in a future post.
So the manager’s ability to control their team’s workload looks to be very important. Making sure interpersonal relations are good, or at least are not causing conflict, looks also to be important.
In today’s workplace people tend to be given more work not less. Teams tend to be given more work without extra resource. So one result we might expect from this is increased stress. Managing workload and interpersonal relationships looks to be part of the solution to managing stress.
One solution for the manager is not to limit workload, as this may not be possible, but to help their team prioritise so that the team feels supported in their workload.