Employee Stress and Burnout at the Workplace Research Paper

Background

Stress is the feeling of emotional or physical tensions resulting from frustrations or anger. At the same time, burnout is a state of general exhaustion resulting from being overwhelmed at a workplace. A combination of stress and burnout can turn into depression if a solution is not sought. Therefore most companies should develop a series of ways to address this for most of their employees to ensure that all workers are well mentally, thus improving their output. Stress at the workplace can be caused by excessive workloads, disagreement between workers, low wages and salaries, lack of social support, and involvement in work that isn’t challenging. In addition, stress and burnout cause a headache and sleep disturbance, resulting in insomnia, a short temper, and even a lack of concentration. However, some companies like Kenya power and lightening company and Coca-Cola have gone the extra mile to develop the best ways to curb and manage the situation among their staff members.

Adoption of Calming Techniques

The Coca-Cola Company has advised its staff to adopt calming techniques that create relaxation time for the staff members. This is done by giving outbreaks to those actively involved in the manufacture of the products and giving leaves for some time; the company has also created shift sessions that allow specified workers to take some rest. The company encourages this by paying its workers even while they are on leave (Wang, 2018). This technique has worked well for the company as it gives enough time for workers to rest and relax from exhaustion. This is depicted by reduced uncertainty, which is currently reported to have reduced by a more significant percentage than in the previous fiscal years. On the other hand, some resigned, and some died due to stress and burnout, thus reducing the company’s production rate.

Introduction of employee’s wellness program

The company has also launched an employee wellness program that mainly deals with the well-being of the staff members and the subordinates to ensure that all the employees are healthy and live a good life. Therefore, the employees can address their relationships, exercise habits, diets, finance, and mental health through the association. The program ensures that most workers are involved in some workouts and exercise to help control burnout. Therefore, the company has employed some well-experienced and professional instructors to help during the workout sessions, which ids in guided meditations.

Setting out workers’ roles and responsibilities

By setting up clear roles and responsibilities for individual workers, the company manages to control overworking other employees as there is clarity in the division of labor, thus reducing boredom and exhaustion of workers. In addition, the workers are there for granted the chance to rest after completing the work potion assigned to them by the company, thus helping Stem create some time to interact with other colleagues and family members, reducing some work stress.

Encouraging collective decision making

The Coca-Cola Company encourages collective decision-making and the contribution of its staff members. As much as the workers and subordinates face some stress and burnout, the highly ranked workers like the managers encounter the same, especially during the decision-making process on the best way to run the company successfully (Shorosh & Berkovich, 2022). It is advisable to have a panel that helps in decision-making on how to run the company rather than assigning the duty to an individual manager who may be subjected to stress and exhaustion. Through sharing the problem, the focus is distributed equally to all the panel members, thus somehow solved

Establishing no tolerance policy for workplace discrimination

Workers face much discrimination in their workplace, including insults from highly ranked workers like the managers, unpaid salaries and wages for a long time, misunderstandings, and ideological differences. All these problems brought together possess much stress and burnout in respective works. Therefore, the company policy clearly outlines unbearable measures for anyone involved in discrimination against fellow workers to curb this situation.

Building up resilience among workers

Resiliency can rejuvenate or bounce back from a stressful situation or negative experience. Coca-Cola company workers are therefore advised to be agile to resume their normal conditions in case of any previous stressful situation or negative impact; this comes as a result of self-motivating or self-drive to be able to come back to the normal condition of life (Peasley, 2022). It, therefore, takes every worker to accept the situation the way it comes and keep pushing on with an expectation of betterment in the future.

Taking personal stress management strategies as a worker

In addition to the company trying to manage stress among its workers and the burnout, the w. workers also take personal measures to reduce stress. This includes; taking a deep breath, which has been scientifically proven to be a stress-reducing procedure through creating brain and general body relaxation of the organs (Jiang et al., 2020). Managing social media time through the workers operating their time spent on social media is always full of illusions and fake moments about life. The workers get to interact with the real-life situations when they are off the press hence controlling the pressure to cope with the social media lifestyle; connecting with others, humans being social creatures, they need to interact. Therefore, the workers create time for interacting with others over the weekends through hikes; the workers are also actively involved in self-meditation by creating personal time and meditation.

Lowering personal standards

It is establishing high standards that create much anxiety to achieve, thus subjecting one to a lot of pressure which makes the workers involved themself in vulnerable situations. Moreover, in case of failure, the worker experiences much stress. Thus, it is advisable to lower standards as a worker. Therefore, this analysis outlines the stress management techniques and best ways to reduce burnout; consequently, it is recommended to adopt wellness programs for workers, use calming techniques, use guided mediation, connect with others, and practice deep breathing.

References

Jiang, H., Jiang, X., Sun, P., & Li, X. (2020). Coping with workplace ostracism: The roles of emotional exhaustion and resilience in deviant behavior. Management Decision.

Peasley, M. C., Hochstein, B., Britton, B. P., Srivastava, R. V., & Stewart, G. T. (2020). Can’t leave it at home? The effects of personal stress on burnout and salesperson performance. Journal of Business Research, 117, 58-70.

Shorosh, S., & Berkovich, I. (2022). The relationships between workgroup emotional climate and teachers’ burnout and coping style. Research Papers in Education, 37(2), 182-198.

Wang, H. (2018). The effects of social support and coping strategies on job stress and burnout. Available at SSRN 3161858.