Stress Management for Managers - Jane's Story

Case Study - Before

Jane manages a department of 20 staff members, part of her managerial responsibilities is the team's mental health and wellbeing. Recently she has noticed that the number of sick days has increased due to stress related illnesses and there has been some conflict with various staff members. Jane realises that there is a stress problem and that by attending a 'Stress Management for Managers' course would provide her with the skills to effectively manage the health and wellbeing of her department.

By attending our Stress Management for Managers course, she learned the physical and behavioural signs of stressed workers, various types of stress related illnesses and their impact, HSE Management Standards which includes the various possible causes of individual and team stress. Jane also learned how to conduct a stress risk assessment using an easy to follow procedure which would help her to identify hazards exposed to the team. She was also taught how to approach staff who had demonstrated signs of stress and how she could use effective communication to fully understand the problem that the employee faced and how to deal with it.

Case Study - After

After Jane had attended the course she was able to take a new perspective on how to deal with stress in the department. Using the HSE Management Standards and a team risk assessment she was able to formulate statistics that enabled her to determine that it was the way change was communicated to staff that was a major cause of stress. With help from Human Resources and higher levels of management changes of practices were communicated to staff quicker and more openly.

Jane using the behavioural signs of stressed workers was able to determine a team member who was suffering from stress, she was able to approach the person and set-up a confidential meeting to discuss the situation in an open and empathetic way. This enabled her to work out some basic changes to the individuals work schedule allowing them more control on how they work.

Benefits

In the short-term Jane was able to improve team members wellbeing by implementing a team risk assessment, this enabled workers to highlight some of stress that they are experiencing. This gave management the insight on reasonable solutions. Long-term her department should see a reduction in absenteeism based on stress, productivity should also improve with a more cohesive working environment.

The course

Stress Management for Managers - Jane's Story

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