This week marks National Stress Awareness Week (Monday 5th to Friday 9th November 2018).
This is the perfect opportunity to talk about stress and stress prevention, as well as promoting the importance of wellbeing for individuals and organisations.
Although stress can occur at any point, with Christmas coming up, and deadlines approaching, it’s a good opportunity to think about stress levels in the workplace and how that may be affecting staff wellbeing. A recent survey by YouGov found that 74% of people have felt so stressed that they have felt overwhelmed or unable to cope, at some point in the last year.
Stress can be caused by all sorts of things but often the workplace can be a major contributing factor, which if ignored can lead to can lead to further or more serious mental health problems.
Whether an employee is stressed because of work or issues outside of work, there are several things you can do to make sure coming to work is not a stressful experience.
Here are some useful resources for both employers and employees:
Wellness Action Plan (WAP):
Whether or not someone is experiencing a mental health problem, a Wellness Action Plan (WAP) is a useful tool to keep track of the wellbeing of employees, and identify an issues at an early stage. This is particularly helpful to find out if an employee is feeling stressed, whether from an issue at work or elsewhere in their life. Managers can use the action plan to put practical steps in place which will ensure an employee feels supported when they aren’t feeling so great, and prevent it from escalating to a point where they feel unable to cope.
You can access Mind’s two guides to WAPs for managers and employees, which both include an interactive WAP template on the Mind website.
Mental Health Gateway:
Mind’s The Mental Health at Work gateway, funded by The Royal Foundation and shaped by charity Heads Together, is a web portal designed to help managers support struggling staff.
The new site, recently unveiled by Prince William, provides an online gateway to resources, training and information regarding workplace wellbeing and mental health support.
www.mentalhealthatwork.org.uk