Have you ever had a miscommunication with a friend or family member, and when you finally talked it out, you realized if you’d talked sooner, you would have avoided a lot of pain, frustration and overall stress? It’s certainly happened to most of us, and as someone in charge of employees, you need to remember that a major reason for workplace stress comes from lack of communication. So what can you do to improve?
- Transparency always helps. One of the major stresses in the workplace involves employees feeling out of the loop when it comes to big decisions and possible problems. While you don’t have to let them know every detail, employees will feel better if you don’t sweep things under the rug, and they may have good suggestions for solving those problems. In the same vein, managers who make employees feel secure about bringing issues to them will end dealing with much less negative fallout.
- Listen and validate. Going along with the previous point, good managers not only listen thoughtfully to employees’ concerns, they do what they can to validate them and help find a solution. If you want to stress out an employee, dismiss their worry that probably took some guts to discuss with you. You don’t have to hand-hold or solve every problem, but as a manager, you have a responsibility to foster a cooperative team, so do what you can to empathize.
- Build a culture of trust. Obviously trust must be earned, and you do this by sticking to your commitments and even allowing for some vulnerability. So when you say you’ll address a concern, the worst thing you can do is forget to follow up or just ignore it outright. The employer and managers whom their employees trust demonstrate the best kind of behavior to their employees…and encourage them to emulate it, thus creating an atmosphere of mutual respect.
Stress is about feeling out of control of a situation, so the more you can give your employees some control, the better off everyone will be. If you want to communicate with someone about your next great hire, reach out to the local staffing experts at PrideStaff Thousand Oaks!
