How Stress Can Impact Your Performance at Work

Stress is inevitable in the workplace. This is an environment that the majority of us will spend eight hours a day, five days a week in. It’s somewhere that we are under pressure, have to meet deadlines, have to meet targets and have to spend a lot of time with people we don’t actively choose ourselves - that is, unless you’re the hiring manager. It’s important that you understand where to draw a line with stress, though. All too many people accept stress on a daily basis. Their work can come to consume their lives, spilling over into their personal life as they worry about targets and expectations or are hassled by work outside of working hours. Instead, we need to find a way to make our work a positive and healthy environment where we complete SMART goals and are able to shut off and enjoy our personal time as soon as we walk out of the door. Here’s some more information that can help you to achieve this.

How Stress Impacts Performance at Work

Stress can massively impact your performance at work. Stressed individuals are much less likely to be able to focus fully on the task at hand. Instead, they’ll be focusing on the stress that they are feeling. Stress at work can see lower productivity levels, more mistakes made, higher levels of conflict in the workplace and employees experiencing high levels of stress are more likely to experience burnout. You want to avoid all of these things. By maintaining low stress levels, you are much more likely to perform well at work and maintain a healthier and happier day to day existence.

Reducing Stress at Work

Seek Medical Assistance If Required

First and foremost, we need to highlight that if your stress is chronic or severe, you should always visit your doctor. They’ll be able to see how you are feeling and can help to find the root causes. This could be through therapy. They may also be able to prescribe medication that can temporarily or permanently help you. They may be able to help you get a medical marijuana card too.

Discuss Stress With Your Manager

You can always start out by discussing stress with your manager. They may be able to make changes to your daily work that will reduce experiences of stress for you. For example, they may be able to set more realistic goals and targets, reduce workload and spread it more fairly around the team, offer training that can assist you in your work or various other measures. Managers can also intervene with conflict resolution between individuals in the workplace. If you feel you can’t discuss issues with your manager, as they are the cause of your stress or are proving unresponsive to your stress, you can always head to your company’s HR department.

Switch Off Outside of Working Hours

Do not engage with work outside of your contracted and agreed working hours. A huge cause of stress is having to work in your personal time. So, when your working hours are complete, make sure to close your laptop or leave your workplace and to cut off from your work. This will provide you with time to enjoy yourself, do the things you want to do and spend quality time with those you love. Setting boundaries and sticking to them is extremely important.

Consider a New Role

If you’ve tried reducing stress at work and aren’t getting anywhere with it, it may be time to consider a different role. There are various reasons that your best efforts to reduce stress might not work. You may have a generally stressful job, such as a surgeon, bomb disposal expert, terrorist negotiator or other positions that will see you working under extreme pressure. If you find that you are struggling with the stress, the role may simply not be for you. Another reason stress can be difficult to manage is if your boss or management simply do not listen to you, do not respect your boundaries and place excessive demands on you. In situations like this, if they won’t change, it may be best for you to leave and find another company to work for.

Stress really can negatively impact both your performance in the workplace and your life outside of work. So, it’s extremely important that you manage work-caused stress as best possible. Hopefully, the suggestions above should help to get this journey started out in the right direction!