So COVID has forced your staff to now work from home or has forced them to now return to work under level 3. Either way, we have to acknowledge that change itself is stressful and will produce stress and anxiety for you and your employees. And while there have been a million articles written about “How to Work Effectively from Home”, we can find very little information offering tangible and practical solutions for employers wanting to support their employees, who are simply not coping with this massive change suddenly thrust upon them.
Effects of Anxiety
But before we share our the pearls of wisdom, you first need to understand the possible effects of anxiety on your employees:
difficulty controlling worry
restlessness, feeling keyed up or on edge
feeling easily fatigued
difficulty concentrating
irritability
muscle tension
sleep disturbances
Now, can you just imagine how this could affect someone’s ability to perform their job? What you might see is an employee quite possibly be struggling to meet targets or deadlines, avoiding you or offering excuses for delays, making frequent mistakes, having difficulty focusing on even basic tasks and/or trouble remembering instructions or processes. Now imagine you have an employee who had an anxious disposition even before COVID hit?
This kind of stress and anxiety needs to be managed effectively to avoid permanent or recurring dysfunction, which will only lead to further distress, significantly impaired productivity as well as money and time lost! To avoid this, we are suggesting that your supervision tactics might need a tweak when handling an employee like this. Here are our tips...
Tip 1: Frequent breaks
An anxious employee will become easily fatigued since they are spending so much time worrying, which can be an exhausting emotional rollercoaster. So, getting up and off a chair to walk, stretch and rest the eyes will limit fatigue from sustained concentration. Setting a reminder every 2 hours to take a 5 min breather is easy to implement and this minor bit of physical activity will encourage greater focus and clarity of thought and reduce the risks of errors emerging when tired.
Tip 2: Quiet workstation
Anyone experiencing anxiety will find themselves easily distracted. Distractions can be internal (thoughts, feelings, ideas) or they can be external (the TV, shopping list on the fridge, kids). These distractions make concentration difficult to sustain. So, while it not always consistently possible, finding a quiet corner to work on the more intense tasks will improve concentration. This will reduce anxiety and improve accuracy.
Tip 3: Management style
An employee experiencing anxiety is generally aware of their limitations to perform at their best. As such, they require a flexible and supportive supervision style, not a punitive one. Imposing punishment or unrealistic expectations will only serve to increase anxiety which will result in even further impaired productivity. Supervisors should therefore work hard to provide positive and constructive reinforcement and feedback. There is no need to lie or embellish the facts, but the way in which a message is communicated is as important, if not more important, than what is said.
Tip 4: Regular check-ins
Anyone having to deal with anxiety will benefit from support. When an employee is working from home, support is naturally harder to provide. So, offering regular check-ins 1-2 times a week would be useful. Word of caution! These could be perceived as “check-ups” and not “check-ins” if not communicated correctly. These check-ins should allow for open discussion about performance and expectation. They might even require assistance with prioritizing tasks and setting deadlines/boundaries and this is a good opportunity to discuss this.
Tip 5: Provision of instructions
An employee who is anxious, will be distracted. And a distracted employee will struggle to remember information – so any verbal instructions provided, need to also be provided in a written format so they have something to refer back to later.
And if at the end of the day, this is just not sufficient – let us assist you all, as difficulties might have now resulted in dysfunction
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