These days, people could easily get stressed out. Bad economy, war in a distant country, the project deadline is upon us and there are other issues that could affect our lives. Business owners often need to bear the increasing stress, not only due to external factors, but also the internal ones. They are simply business owner, parent, husband/wife, co-worker, leader, etc all rolled into one. They need to manage a lot of things and they can be so busy that they don’t really realize that they are stressed. Stress is also a strong contributing factor of various physical issues, such as migraines, hypertension, strokes, chronic pain and others. Businesspeople who experience this problem will suffer for even more decline in overall performance.
Business owners should be aware of various physical and emotional signs that lead to severe stress. They may suffer from upset stomach, headaches, “butterflies” in the stomach, insomnia and palpitation. It is also easy for people to get angry without reason. They may also have problems focusing on something and they have confused thinking. Reduced short term memory could also become a big problem for many business owners.
It is important for us to know what we and the staff can be easily stressed out. Some or most people could be angered easily. They could also become short-tempered easily. We should be aware that stressed out workers are less effective when dealing with customer service. They are also likely to make more errors when working. They are less efficient when it comes to completing various tasks and they are not able to handle multiple tasks. In this case, we may need to re-assign tasks among remaining employees, further increasing the stress level inside the team. Another solution is to hire some fresh new employees, but this also means higher salary costs for the company.
As we are waiting for the stressed out employees to return to their normal states, we could eventually lost money and time. Errors on partially completed works could require some tasks to be re-done. This will cost us time and money. People with higher level of stress could become short-tempered with other co-workers or worse, even with customers. In this case, they are less likely to purchase our services and products.
It is important to know that stress could badly affect our bottom line. In the times of economic challenge, intense stress could even kill our businesses. In this case, business owners should know what they need to do during this situation. When stress starts to badly affect the company, business owners as leaders should help people to work smarter and not longer. Once we work for more than 45 hours a week, we could start to see signs of stress. Unless we have tight deadline, we shouldn’t put in more work hours. In some cases, multi-tasking could also be counter-productive. Instead, we should make a list of things that we want to accomplish today. We should prioritize on one task, until it’s completed then move to other tasks. This is a much more logical way of doing things.
