Rising Stress Thermometers... Decreasing Profit - by Jenny Craig, LCSW, BCD

Stress.  One word with the power to shorten our very lives, steal our time, and ruin our businesses.  Stress at work eats away at productivity, creativity, and connectivity.  All of which translates in the business environment into less fulfillment and decreased profit. 

If you have discovered a co-worker under high levels of stress, you may feel that this co-worker has regressed to the intellectual and emotional capacity of a cave person.  And, let me be the first to tell you, you were right to think that way.  Research has proven that we are still wired as if we were cave people.  So, bear with me (no pun intended) and let’s discover why we can all act like cave people sometimes.  If we currently were being chased by a bear, all of us would have the exact same “fight or flight” response.  Picture that you have an internal “stress thermometer” that upon seeing a bear immediately goes from a healthy level of stress (let’s say 30 degrees) all the way up to 100 degrees.  At 100 degrees, your mind and body immediately adjusts by heightening the senses necessary (and dulling those not currently needed) to run or fight thestressor – currently a bear.  When we successfully outwit or overpower the bear, our stress thermometers naturally take us back to a healthy level.  Over thousands of years, this adaptation has helped us survive dire situations, but is now reeking havoc in the business world.  The reason being that our current stressors are normally not resolved by running from them or fighting them.  Therefore, humans are storing stress and have not yet adapted to naturally lowering their personal stress thermometer.  As a result, people end up reacting to every day life like they are being chased by a bear.  Which completely makes sense why your stressed out co-worker or employee is making more mistakes, having trouble making decisions and is quite a bear to be around.  I mean, be honest, how well are you balancing your check book if you are being chased by a bear?  How worried are you about being friendly if you were being chased by a bear?

Other professionals would forgive me if I were being chased by a bear and ran right over them over, made a big mistake or flipped out.  Although, unless you are a game warden or other wildlife professional, I bet your stressors are currently not coming from a bear.  So what is raising your company’s stress thermometer and what can you do to lower it?

Determine the bears in the office.  Many things can raise the company stress thermometer.  Are sales down?  Are people focusing on the negative?  How about that irritating coworker?  Sit down and take an honest inventory of the unhealthy stressors affecting your business. 

Look for the bears in the bushes.  Ask your employees to submit an honest, anonymous inventory of the office stressors.  Every person has a different vantage point and may be able to identify stressors that you have not seen.  Be prepared, you may be perceived as one of the bears.

Once a bear is discovered, take action.  Under stress, we often forget that there are innumerable ways to manage a problem.  Take a moment and determine the top three stressors that need addressed in your office.  Schedule a brainstorming meeting with others to determine ten ways to battle each stressor.  Try out the ideas and find the ideas that help lower your company’s stress thermometer. 

Remember, lowering the stress thermometer even a little will make a difference.

Keep Bear traps around.  Positive energy and stress do not like to hang out together.  Keep an ongoing list of positives about your organization.  There are always great things happening within your company and how it makes a difference in the world.  Keep an ongoing list of what is going well posted for people to see every day.  Encourage employees to keep adding to the list.

Since our cavemen ancestors did not deal with the stressors we have in our current business environment, they often did not struggle with brain fog, trouble thinking, crankiness, decreased productivity, or a lack of teamwork.  Our business environments now require us to take action to lower our company stress thermometers to increase creativity, productivity, and profits.  And, if all else fails, I guess you can act like a caveman and club the competition or that cranky co-worker over the head and drag them away.