Stress has always been a side-effect of pursuing ambitions and chasing goals in a relentlessly fast and competitive world. The impact of stress at work could range from mild signs like forgetfulness and occasional irritation to more severe manifestations like anxiety, depression and withdrawal from interactions and responsibilities. It was at a time when organizations had barely gotten round to addressing stress issues within their environments that a new catastrophe struck. Covid. With lockdowns and restrictions on even the smallest and simplest of freedoms, this unprecedented phase elevated an already existing problem to even more devastating proportions.
Like the world, at SocioSquares we too were impacted by the Covid phase. In fact, we continued being impacted even after the world around us slowly started getting back to their physical work environments. Because we’re primarily a virtual workplace, we had no choice but to keep our employees operating in a virtual space. Unlike other employees, our employees couldn’t get back to brainstorming with colleagues in conference rooms, enjoy chats in the pantry or sit across in person with HR staff or department heads to share their concerns or problems. With nowhere to go except Zoom meeting rooms, the stress in our employees was palpable, and we realized something had to be done, and fast.
This is when we introduced the activity of virtual stress tests for all our employees on a weekly basis. Every week in a collective virtual session, each of our employees would be invited to anonymously answer a simple question on their screens “How stressful has your week been?” At the start of this exercise, we discovered close to one-third of our employees were falling within the severely stressed category. We took immediate measures in the form of initiating counseling sessions with our HR staff and/or department heads. These sessions helped us understand an overstressed employee’s problem which enabled us to provide stress alleviating solutions in the form of reduced workloads, altered responsibility profiles, extra team support, sanctioned work breaks, and so on. With ongoing problem identification and resolution over the next few months, we were able to bring down the population in the severely stressed category to 0. And it has remained so since, although we do end up with an entrant or two in this category occasionally. However, we are now quickly able to defuse an overstressed employee and mitigate them to a stress category that is healthier and definitely more manageable.
Stress is perhaps the greatest productivity killer at most workplaces. At SocioSquares, we believe though stress is unavoidable in a severely competitive world, it can be controlled and prevented from damaging an organization’s fabric. Early detection and remedy of stress is key to cultivating a workplace that employees like being at, and where they are more favorably inclined to collaborate, learn, perform, grow and lead.
