April every year is Stress Awareness Month, when individuals and businesses put a spotlight on stress, the impact it has and how it can be combatted. However, tackling the issue of stress – particularly stress in the workplace – shouldn’t only be on employers’ radars in April. As such, we caught up with Paul Owen, MD of The True Sales Company, to consider the impact on teams that operate in unnecessarily stressful environments and what needs to be done.
The UK is in the midst of a “modern-day stress epidemic” according to the Stress Management Society. It is a claim that figures from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) clearly back up. An estimated 914,000 cases of work-related stress, depression or anxiety led to the loss of 17 million working days during 2021/22, according to HSE data. Chief Executive Sarah Albon reports that:
“Stress and poor mental health is the number one cause of work-related ill health. The effects of stress, depression, and anxiety can have a significant impact on an employee’s life and on their ability to perform their best at work.”
Of course, some roles are inherently more stressful than others, simply due to the nature of the work. Jobs in the blue light services are the obvious example. Yet there are also working environments in which stress is unnecessarily applied. The True Sale’s Company’s Paul Owen has first-hand experience of this, having worked with sales teams around the UK. He explains:
“There seems to be some kind of cultural belief that salespeople perform best under pressure, but this is often not the case. Salespeople are still people. You can’t push them beyond reasonable limits. The kind of workplace stress that they often perform under is usually counterproductive – as well as entirely unavoidable.”
The stress that sales teams end up under comes from multiple sources. According to Owen, one derives from a lack of understanding about what sales actually is. Many people misconceive sales as the ability to sell anything to anyone at any time. Yet that’s not actually the case. A product or service for which a market isn’t ready is unlikely to thrive, no matter how skilled those selling it may be. Yet popular culture has led to a lack of understanding of this, by salespeople, those managing them and the general public. It is this misunderstanding of sales that paves the way to unrealistic targets, which can become a major source of stress.
Even when sales staff hit their targets, the stress doesn’t necessarily end. Sometimes, managers inadvertently introduce further stress as a direct result of targets being met. Owen comments:
“Time and again, I’ve seen successful salespeople hit their annual targets by the third quarter of the year, only for management to respond by increasing their target. That’s not motivational – it’s stressful. It’s like a punishment for hitting their target in good time.”
While we’ve looked at workplace stress in relation to sales roles here, the lessons we can learn apply to a huge range of other teams. The first is that ensuring staff feel confident in their roles is essential. Regular training, coaching and shadowing can all help with this.
Also important is the need to work within the economy, instead of despite of it. External factors can impact a wide range of roles, causing it to become difficult for staff to hit targets that just a short while before were viable. Given the economic fluctuations and uncertainty that seems to be washing over the planet of late, it is essential to recognise this and flex both individual targets and corporate goals in response to it.
By taking a systematic approach to ironing out frustrations that cause stress, businesses can make a surprising difference when it comes to bringing down employees’ stress levels. Even minor-seeming frustrations, such as a slow-running computer or a printer that doesn’t work reliably, can become sources of stress when employees must put up with them on a daily basis. Yet many of these irritations don’t take much time or money to fix. As such, businesses that want to support their staff to destress would be well served by tackling a list of practical irritations, as well as looking at the way they manage their teams and set their targets. MD Paul Owen concludes:
“Removing work-related stress benefits everyone concerned. It can positively impact employees, both at work and outside of it, as well as the company, through reduced employee absence and greater productivity. This is something that every employer has the power to tackle this Stress Awareness Month.”
Economy Standard
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