Does your average day in the office have you pulling out your hair by mid-afternoon? Here’s how to get the most out of every day and boost your happiness
Does your average day in the office have you pulling out your hair by mid-afternoon? Here’s how to get the most out of every day and boost your happiness
Few things can slow down your productivity at work like stress. It affects everything from our physical well-being and emotional state of mind to our relationships with the people we work with and beyond. Worse of all, stress can even lead to burnout and a host of health problems in the long run. but relieving the burdens of stress, especially when we spend a large chunk of time at the office, is often easier said than done. With the help of experts, we explore the damaging effects of stress before, during and after you clock in for work.
The Wake-Up Test
What’s your immediate reaction to your goals set out for the morning? If you consistently have a sense of dread, restlessness and anxiety towards them the moment you wake up, motivational speaker David Lim says there’s a problem. “If you’re failing the test on a regular basis, you need to think about what you really want out of your work life. When work goals don’t match your realities that is when stress emerges and causes long-term systemic problems that can’t be reversed.”
David adds that there are immediate solutions people can undertake to manage stress in the workplace but likens them to band aids that only help to contain the blood flow when one gets cut. “If you leave the wound to fester without administering any medicine, you may have to get that limb amputated in the future. That’s what these short-term solutions do. They don’t get to the root of the problem,” he laments.
one piece of advice David did have to share was that office workers under a lot of pressure should take a step back and assess the situation. “A simple way to avoid stress is to not react to it. Don’t make any life-altering decisions within 90 seconds of a stressful situation arising,” explains David. Instead, he recommends taking six deep breaths.
Pursuing Happiness
It is sound advice because a study in the American Journal of Hypertension indicated that breath control can actually help to quell an errant stress response. Lower stress levels lead to happier workers and happier workers means more office productivity. “When people are happy, they’re more motivated and they inject a lot of positive energy into the workplace.
It’s good for morale,” says erman Tan, President of Singapore Human resources Institute (SHrI). “Happy employees also try to find solutions instead of getting bogged down by problems, and they bounce back from setbacks and periods of stress faster than their unhappy colleagues.”
In a workplace happiness survey conducted by SHrI, they found that the industries where workers tend to be most happy are the social work sectors and those who are employed by Small and medium enterprises. Interestingly, those who work for the Finance and banking sector did not rate highly on the happiness scale. Conventional wisdom holds that if you pay workers enough, they’ll be more productive but erman disagrees.
“Our survey results revealed that there’s more to happiness than just financial gain. People who earn more were not necessarily happier so financial incentives alone aren’t enough to make for highly productive employees,” says erman. As he sees it, the answer is clear cut – “happiness leads to greater levels of profit” for companies that take the right steps. but the burden for improving workers’ satisfaction needn’t rest with companies alone. “organisations can make the work place more enjoyable but it’s up to the individual staff members to reciprocate that.”
