Stress And The Workplace: Effectiveness At Work

Effectiveness at work means more than just checking off all the items on your “To Do” list. It means getting along with your co-workers, interacting with management, and keeping clients or customers satisfied. It requires all of your talents, skills and abilities. And the quickest way to disrupt this is to be under stress. The greater the stress, the more disrupted you are. The more disrupted you are, the less effective you are.

Simplistic stress management techniques won’t work in today’s competitive environment. They may make you feel better for a little bit, or may help you focus for a brief time. But most stress management techniques do not focus on the stress, only on your reaction to stress. They do not transform the stressful situations. You need a comprehensive system that eliminates stress.

Here are 5 ways a comprehensive system can help you eliminate stress and the workplace:
1. Time management and goal setting that controls time. Two major sources of stress at work are interruptions and work flow disruptions. A robust time management system and goals that resist being overruled can minimize or eliminate this stress.
2. Maximizing your energy level to the tasks at hand maximizes your personal effectiveness. To paraphrase Vince Lombardi, “fatigue makes unemployed cowards of us all.” Too many times, you feel drained at the end of the day, but cannot recall what you did to make yourself so tired. Most likely it was simply inefficient use of your energy by tackling simple tasks when your energy level is high, and complex tasks when your energy level is low.
3. Staying fit and in shape overcomes the bad health effects of stress. Stress by its nature wears down your systems that fight it. This makes you more vulnerable to the next big stressful situation. But having fitness as part of your comprehensive stress management system can defeat this aspect of stress.
4. Integrating feedback and planning about stress can anticipate and minimize stress. Very few systems include any mechanisms to test their own effectiveness. They rely instead on making you feel good or feel better. A truly effective system will force you to measure how well it performs and how you can improve it each time.
5. Proper use of yoga and meditation as stress relief and prevention. These two systems have so much more to offer than merely stress relief that to use them only for stress is like using a microwave oven only to heat up water for tea.

Any system you use should improve your life, not just maintain it. A quality weightlifting program will make you stronger. A quality training program will give you new skills. And a quality system addressing stress should make your life better, not just put your life back the way it was. That is what too many current stress systems do. They simply keep you from getting worse, instead of helping you improve and advance.

Stress is a tremendous barrier to your personal effectiveness at work. If you can eliminate the distraction and energy draining aspects of stress, you can then turn all of your skills and talents to the tasks you face at work. This will make it seem like you have added another person to help you at everything you do. It will also keep you cool and focused under pressure or in the middle of chaos. This will be noticed by people, especially when everyone else is panicking.