Articles : 3 Ways You Can Help Your Employees Deal with Workplace Anxiety

Mental health in the workplace really came to the forefront during the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, a lot of employees started to recognize the strain and stress their work was putting on them, which lead to waves of companies experiencing the “Great Resignation” and “Quiet Quitting.”

So in this article, we are going to discuss what workplace anxiety is and how you can recognize it and what you can do as an employer to support your staff if they are experiencing it.

What is workplace anxiety?
Workplace anxiety refers to the anxiety that an employer experiences due to the stresses that they experience from work. The cause of workplace anxiety isn’t just about burnout, but it can occur as a result of a number of reasons like:

• Dealing with bullies in the workplace
• Having a demanding manager
• A lack of direction on tasks and projects
• Having low reward (low pay, no benefits)

Recognizing it can be hard, especially if your employees aren’t talking about it and hiding it every chance they get. But it’s important to recognize the signs associated with workplace anxiety in order to assist your team in doing and feeling better, which overall will lead to better productivity and leading as a better manager or supervisor. Some signs include:

• Worrying
• Speaking very fast
• Sweating
• Looking fatigued
• Taking a lot of time off work
• Overreacting in situations
• Having trouble completing tasks
• Quality of work has decreased

So, how can you help?
1. Ensure you provide mental health support to your staff. Whether it’s having an open discussion with your team about anxiety and other mental health experiences, providing helpful handouts/emails with tips on managing daily stressors – creating an open and comfortable environment will help your employees be more open about their own experiences, which in turn can help you help them with what they are struggling with.

2. If an employee reaches out to you about their anxiety struggles in the office, work with them to find ways to help eliminate this for them on a daily basis. Maybe they are having trouble with the deadlines you are providing with everything else they have on their plate – can you give the employee a more reasonable completion time? If they have too much assigned to them – are you able to allocate certain tasks and projects to someone else on the team? Does the employee need to take a couple of mental health days? Have an open and honest conversation with them.

3. Another way you can help ease anxiety among your staff is by promoting flexibility. This can be done in a number of ways. You could change deadlines (like mentioned above). If you offer a hybrid working environment, perhaps an employee needs to work from home an extra day before coming back into the office again. If your employee has kids, maybe they need to take a couple of half days to help ease the tension a little bit. 
 

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