Working in and for a large business, I see it everyday. People, my colleagues, my team feeling under pressure, feeling stressed often due to workload;  but it’s not just workload.  The fact that large organisations contain lots of people, often required to collaborate across different geographies and time-zones to get things done, requires far more advanced and formal communication structures that may not exist,  leading to ‘misalignment’ which is costly both to you, the employee, and the organisation.

Suzanne Bourner, who runs Human Driven Business,  an organisation which helps managers and leaders get the best from their teams and therefore achieve better results, highlights the main 6 stressors in the workplace (Source: ACAS):

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  1. High Demands –  employees feel overloaded with the work they’re expected to tackle. They have high demands and unachievable workloads
  2. Little Control – employees feel they have no say or choice over how and when they do their work
  3. Little Support – employees feel unable to approach managers for help, and haven’t got a support network or system around them
  4. Unsatisfactory Relationships – failure to build good relationships between peers and managers
  5. Unclear Role – employees don’t know what’s expected of them
  6. Change – is always unsettling, but poor communication from ‘the top’ especially around change can make the situation much worse

So what is changing?

However, it’s not all bleak. Yes, working in big businesses can be stressful places, but you can reduce the stress that you personally experience by building stress-reducing techniques into your life.

A good starting point is by signing up for the Healthy Habits e-zine,  delivered to your inbox every month.

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Want more in-depth information? 

Get a copy of my book Success Without Stress which is full of practical tips and techniques to help you reduce the negative stress in your life.

Available in print or kindle edition:

Click Here if you are in the UK/Europe

Click Here if you are in the US

 

Thanks to Suzanne for such a great piece, worthy of repeating here and discussing in more detail. Next time we will discuss more of the article including the ways that big business has been tackling stress in the workplace.