Most of these may seemingly be so small and easily solvable that, outwardly at least, they would appear to be insignificant both to individuals’ mental wellbeing and to the overall outcome of the task. Other problems could clearly be considered major setbacks requiring intervention of some kind. Whether an employee is undergoing a constant bombardment of small stressors and/or has experienced a major setback at work, there is the risk of negative outcomes such as a decline in the employee’s mental well-being, impacting on their performance and those around them.
All employers have legal responsibility under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 to ensure the health, safety and welfare at work of their employees. Ensuring employees’ health, safety and welfare includes minimising their risk of stress-related illness. Whilst it is easy to assume that, at your place of work, employees are coping fine without any extra help in dealing with stress in the workplace, this is rarely the case. One in five employees report their job to be very or extremely stressful. The latest estimates from the Labour Force Survey on work-related stress show that in 2015/16 stress accounted for 37% of all work-related ill health cases, and 45% of all working days lost due to ill health. From this, it is clear that workplace stress does not only affect employees negatively, but it also results in a loss for the business. It has been found that techniques such as Mindfulness can reduce anxieties by 48%, indicating that individuals can be taught methods which will greatly help them to cope with stress and adversities in the workplace. Providing training in such methods helps to fulfil the employers’ responsibility to minimise the risk of stress-related illness in their staff.
Resilience Training is an opportunity for employees to increase their capability to recover from difficult times, to deal with pressure, to adapt well to change and to help them to identify strategies to reduce stress. The training does not only help employees to understand what resilience is and how it can be built, but it also creates an open forum within the working environment in which employees can feel more confident in discussing mental wellbeing with colleagues. This is vital in improving employees’ abilities to assess their own mental well-being as well as their abilities to identify and effectively deal with stressed colleagues.
Businesses who act to provide resilience training for their employees, take the step to ensure their employees’ mental wellbeing. Altruist Enterprises are an experienced provider of Resilience training and as such offer a 3-hour course in resilience training for between 8-16 employees at a time who will learn the vital skill of how to effectively cope with stress and adversities in their lives.
If you'd like to educate your team on the effects of stress, we offer face to face Resilience and Stress Management Training and Online Resilience and Stress Management Training.