The recruitment industry is demanding, fast pace, intense pressure, yet incredibly rewarding.

The pressure of sourcing talent and building a client base can get stressful. This coupled with other coworkers going through the same pressures can cause tensions to run high or worse, eruptions of stress overload in the workplace!

So how do you manage this when the stakes are so high?

It’s the workplaces responsibility to provide a psychologically safe place to work for it’s employees, and this means from a holistic perspective of providing stress relief resources but also  from a systemic perspective of reducing workload when it gets too much, providing flexibility when necessary. Let's go into that in more detail because stress can only be managed, not eradicated.

What is stress?

Stress is our body's response to pressure. Many different situations or life events can cause stress. It is often triggered when we experience something new or unexpected that threatens our sense of self or when we feel we have little control over a situation. We all deal with stress differently.

How do individuals manage stress?

Stress relief can be different for everyone. For some it can be taking a relaxing bath or reading a book. For others it can be exercise and activity, using the heart to pump blood round the body at a high pressure so that we release our happy hormones serotonin and dopamine. These are two ends of the spectrum and they have their additional benefits too. Relaxation can help de-stress the body if it is over worked and burning out. Exercise and activity can help de-stress the body if it is still fit and healthy, for example you are still getting sufficient sleep each night and your nutrition is on point. In order to manage your individual stress correctly you must first practice the basics of living a healthy lifestyle.

How can workplaces create less stressful environments?

In the recruitment industry, stress is one of the highest causes of sickness absence. This is down to the nature of the fast pace environment. HR managers will struggle to get everyone together for a seminar on how to manage stress and they will struggle to justify in house one to one support with a specialist too.

Education and intervention can take place elsewhere and also be facilitated by the company using certain benefits like health cash plans which give the employees an allowance to use on things like private health care without it costing them a lot of money, they can also implement a proactive engagement service such as platinum wellbeing which uses health assessments to provide opportunities for employees to use their cash plans with the right specialist.

However, benefits aside there can still be a huge stress problem in the industry if workplaces don’t tackle the very prevalent and often overlooked systemic issues out there such as;

• Unrealistic workloads

• Taking on roles that people aren’t trained for

• Limited time or space to clear your head

• Toxic behaviours and language used around health and wellbeing in the office

• Unqualified management teams

• Non-inclusive language

How can you fix these issues?

• Give people more realistic workloads

• Listen to them when they say they are burning out or struggling to cope

• Don’t push them so far out of their limits because they achieved their goal

• Ask them to rate how intense they felt their workload was upon completion of a job or target

• Make the reasonable adjustments for the employee based on their feedback

• Put management through full training before they take up a role, not after

• Promote flexibility for people to be able to go for a walk or take a break from the noise

• Provide a ‘relaxing area where there’s no shop talk’ allowed

• Be very clear in what is acceptable language around health and wellbeing topics and what is not

• Invest in more qualifications for management teams

• Educate everyone and use more inclusive language

Hopefully you have enough here to go away and make some small adjustments to your current wellbeing strategy. Stress ebbs and flows through our life and we will never eradicate it, and rightly so. Our bodies become more advanced under stress, we adapt and get better when stress is applied in moderation. Make sure that you take a good look in the mirror at your organisation and really be honest with yourself, is my company a psychologically safe place to work? Do my employees know exactly what is available to them and what lengths we are willing to go for them?

If you have found this article helpful in your recruitment journey why not give it a share?

And if you wish to consult with Teeside Health Co on your workplace wellbeing requirements, please reach out to us on info@teessidehealthco.com