It’s no secret that as we push towards our career goals, some of us spend far too much time focused on our work and not enough time focused on ourselves.

In recent years, stress and burnout have become more and more critical health issues, leading to serious illness and sick leave. Work related stress is especially (but not only) problematic for those who are in the beginning of their careers, trying to make a name for themselves and prove to their superiors that they are worth this promotion or that corner office. They deal with great amounts of workplace stress without knowing how to cope with stress at work, leading to strong physical and mental exhaustion.

What are the main symptoms of burnout syndrome?

Among the main burnout symptoms, the most prevalent and subtle are the ones we deal with every day and associate with regular work-related stress. Therefore, the symptoms of burnout syndrome are the same as the work stress symptoms. According to Psychology Today, the telltale most important burnout and stress symptoms are:

• Chronic fatigue: constantly feeling like you have no energy.
• Insomnia: not being able to fall asleep, or waking up many times in the night, no matter how tired you are.
• Forgetfulness and inability to concentrate: A general sense of not being able to focus and forgetting tasks.
• Physical symptoms and increased illness: anything from chest pains to digestive issues, and since your body and mind are so tired, you find yourself catching colds more often and staying sick longer.
• Psychological symptoms: these generally begin with anxiety and turn into increased depressive tendencies, irritability, and full on anger.

What are the causes of burnout due to work stress?

The causes of stress in the workplace are more diverse than one would expect. Next to individual personality characteristics (such as perfectionism or poor stress management strategies), a company’s poor organisational structures play an important role in producing work related stress. According to the consulting company Gallup’s study, the 5 main causes of stress at work are:

1. Being treated unfairly: due to bias, favouritism, and mistrust, among other reasons.
2. Unmanageable workloads: high performance work calls for impossible workloads.
3. Unclear role descriptions: not knowing exactly what is expected from an employee.
4. Lack of managerial communication and support: many people feel like they are not being properly informed and/or supported by their managers.
5. Unrealistic deadlines: impossible workloads with even more impossible turnaround times.

How to deal with stress at work?

There are many ways of how the causes of stress at work can be alleviated. One CNBC report offers suggestions of both learning your strengths as well as understanding your weaknesses and limits, which facilitates the challenge of dealing with stress at work. Also, good communication and making sure you have a group of supportive colleagues to go to for help when needed is important for stress relief. Lastly, finding the right managerial support to search for strategies on how to cope with stress at work together is essential.

Many articles nowadays tend to focus on these options as ways to eliminate the causes of stress in the workplace, as well as incorporating regular exercise, relaxation techniques and good sleep to your daily routine. Consequently, we thought we would take a slightly different approach on how to deal with stress at work.

In this series, focused on work stress and mental health, we will discuss the ways in which we have found the media and business travel to be significant factors in the tipping point from ‘healthy’ amounts of workplace stress to burnout leading to sick leave.

Join us in the comings weeks as we look further into how email and business travel truly affect us as workers in the modern era, and how you and/or your company can make use of our telephonic services to help everyone dealing with stress at work.

It’s no secret that since the dawn of the American Dream, even in Europe everyone has been looking for a way to make millions. Celebrities, people who are born into money, and Silicon Valley moguls who had the right idea at the right time make it all look so easy. There is an ever-growing dialogue of “if you just work hard enough, you can make your dreams come true”.

But reality looks different: when people earn less, often much less, than that, dreams of becoming a millionaire can be very far away. So we often use this line of thinking to justify working 18 hour days to Get Rich. But life isn’t “when we are rich”, it’s right here and right now. And what do we end up with? Stress! Lots and lots of stress!

En route to Burn Out City

It’s not uncommon to experience stress at work. Studies reveal that 46% of workplace stress is caused by workload. With big projects, deadlines, dealing with difficult clients or colleagues, this isn’t necessarily ground-breaking information. But there is a fine line between a normal and unhealthy amount of stress. A study done at Harvard found that time and productivity lost at work due to stress costs American businesses somewhere around $30 billion per year. In Europe, it was even found that stress leads to a loss of 27 productive work days per employee, per year. That’s one whole month lost per person, per year, due to stress!

Those of us who have that big, rich American dream in our sights tend to put in long hours and extra effort, but we’re never sure if it’s enough. We’re often left to our own devices with no praise or compensation for those extra things in the short term. It’s in those situations where we can be at risk for going from stress to burn out.

Possible stress symptoms

Left [un-paid-attention-to], excessive stress can lead to demotivation, constantly thinking about work, irritability, difficulty making decisions, and (lack of) sleep issues. Moreover, it can cause headaches, nausea, and even weaken our immune systems, leaving us to get sick with colds, flus, etc. more often.

Even more, putting in extra hours and effort doesn’t always lead to job security? However, job insecurity is another major stressor! Research shows that in women, this type of stress leads to higher rates of illnesses, including diabetes and chronic migraines and neck pain; in men, chest pains and hypertension, and up to two weeks taken off of work due to these issues.

Experts on the subject tend to suggest lifestyle changes, such as adding exercise and meditation to your daily routine . But when you’re already feeling bogged down by work, making these kinds of changes as your first step to relieve stress can seem overwhelming.

Telephony to reduce stress

So what if we all took that little step back to telephony? Imagine working from home with a phone number connected to your company’s virtual PBX, so you can be reached just as though you were sitting in the office, without the stress of always having to be there. Contact us for more information about virtual phone numbers worldwide.

E-mails, e-mails, e-mails!

It’s no secret that many of us end up answering emails hours before we arrive at the office, and hours after we leave. This is detrimental to our health as it heightens anxiety, contributes to workplace stress and takes time away from our friends and family .

One way to start the process of dealing with stress at work is to look at your emailing habits. How much time do you really lose on emails? The average employee sends and receives more than 120 emails per day . One study shows that people spend up to 12 hours per week in the office and another 5 hours at home reading and responding to emails . When looking for strategies on how to deal with stress at work, e-mails are a critical factor.

Of course, e-mail communication has its benefits. But how much easier would your day to day life be if you weren’t constantly refreshing your inbox to reply to Operations, or writing, rewriting, and editing emails to your boss? Wouldn’t this facilitate managing stress at work?

Think about all of the actual work you could get done in that amount of time! More research shows that spending less time in your inbox and replies will lead to stress relief . Which is probably why some companies have even banned after hours e-mailing due to the added work stress .

Leave Your Work at Work

The easiest way for stress management in the workplace seems so obvious, leave work at the office, including your e-mails! So many of us have our work e-mails set up to our smartphones, we don’t think twice about it – neither about the time wasted, nor about the additional workplace stress, or the implicated security risks. Accessing work data on unsecure WiFi at a café, or not properly secured WiFi at home, even, can lead to small (or even large) data breaches. But how often do we think about things such as work stress when work email on our smartphones just seems natural?

We thought of some stress management strategies to try out. Imagine not being available 24 hours a day via email. What if we deleted our work e-mail setup on our smartphones and gave ourselves the challenge of only checking e-mails when we are at our computers. This isn’t to say not to check your e-mails at all, sometimes it’s necessary when you have a looming deadline or leading up to important pitch meetings. Or what if you gave yourself only one hour at home to look at afterhours emails, and other than that you stayed offline? It gives you a chance to reduce workplace stress drastically while still staying up to date. Even more radically, what if one day per week you set an out-of-office email, letting people know you are only available via phone at a few specific times during the day. These “time outs” are a great possibility for stress management in the workplace.

But there is a solution for stress relief at work. Moving from constant and consistent written communication back to the basics of telephony has the potential to change not only your outlook on your work life, but reintegrate some person-to-person connection that gets lost in the digital world.But What If It’s Important?

But What If It’s Important?

You might argue that getting that email from your manager or team lead every morning is important for planning your days, albeit the increased work stress and risk for burnout. But there are other ways to do this.

Our founder and CEO Hans Lasonder remembers a simpler time, before e-mails started taking over business communication. “Years before I started this company, I worked for a number of multinationals. I distinctly remember that in one of these positions, we had Monday morning call-ins. Monday mornings at 7 am, we were invited to dial into the weekly report with our regional director. In these morning sessions, the director would summarise the last week’s agenda and set us up for the week ahead. This made Monday morning commutes that much better for many of us, dialling into those calls made Monday starts at the office that much easier”.

By making concessions to e-mailing like this (but in favour of coping with stress at work), we save time, stress and energy that is otherwise lost in written communication. Often people use e-mails to avoid confrontation and making decisions . Think about how many times you’ve received an e-mail where you didn’t quite understand what the person was communicating. Then, instead of picking up the phone to clarify the issue, playing e-mail tag all day trying to figure it out. How much additional work stress did this cause?

Need an easy fix to help dealing with stress at work? Instead of long e-mail chains, what if you took your business back to basics and implemented that weekly conference call Hans reminisced about to make sure everyone is on the same page and can spend their weeks doing meaningful and productive work, instead of chasing down emails. It’s one of the easiest and most feasible stress management strategies at work!

We can help you with that. Get in touch for a quote for local (conference call-in) numbers for your employees near and far!

We’ve all experienced the technical difficulties when trying to put together a video conference call with more than one other party. Of course, the preferred alternative would be face-to-face meetings, but with ongoing globalization and employees sometimes being thousands of kilometers away from each other, making cross-country or cross-continent meetings can be a hassle. 

Instead, we’ve moved to doing almost everything through email. But we all know the struggles of having important conversations through email chains. Reply? Reply All? Who should I CC:? Or should I use BCC:?

With the almost invasive presence of email in the business sphere, we tend to forget that, sometimes, the better (perhaps even best) option is to have a good, old fashioned conference call.

Closing (international) spaces

Globalization means that many of us have colleagues and/or clients in different cities, and some on different continents. While it is occasionally possible to get together for business meetings with the right amount of notice, it’s not always the case. 

Think about emergencies which need to be dealt with ASAP – sometimes quicker than the time it takes to fly from one end of the country to the other, let alone overseas! 

Our geo- and toll-free numbers can help you make fast meetings happens. Using our numbers to make conference calls will take the stress away from cross-country and cross-continental emergencies.

Fussing over language barriers

Some issues that can come about when having contact with colleagues and/or clients in different countries are based on language. In an email with someone who doesn’t share your native language, certain turns of phrases can be miscommunicated and taken the wrong way. This can result in emails coming off as rude or condescending when they are not meant to be. Bringing the humanity back to business conversation through real-time conversation helps to eliminate this barrier. It also gives all parties the opportunity to ask questions and clarify anything that may feel unclear.

There are even technologies that are becoming more and more readily available for the real-time translation of conversations! This means that all parties in international meetings could come to the tele-meeting and speak in their own language.

Setting up local numbers for your international colleagues and clients will help you make better use of teleconferencing since everyone can come to the meeting without worrying about hiring translators, for example.

Business travel can come at many costs 

One unbelievable cost of travel is the damage done to the planet regularly. In case you missed our Series on Sustainability, we went into detail about how business travel damages our environment and contributes to global warming.

Obviously, travel also comes with a number of financial costs. Think about all of the expenses put into business travel: flights, meals, hotels. The costs saved avoiding small, unnecessary trips can be monumental for small to medium sized businesses.

While it doesn’t happen too often, any number of issues – from bad weather to mechanical issues, sometimes even a pilot being unfit to fly – can cause an airline to cancel a flight.

Likewise, it’s important to think about the physical costs of travel on those who are going back and forth for meetings. Just look at the results found in a study about people who travel often for work. Studies have found that extensive business travel can lead to obesity, alcohol dependence, and depression, among other health issues.

It is obvious that going back to the basics of simply using our voices and talking to each other over the phone and have a conference call, rather than having to deal with everything that could go wrong through text or in transit, is a serious option for many small to medium sized businesses. 

We can help you with that. Get in touch for a quote for local numbers for your employees near and far!

In the last month, we explained what causes stress at work and the symptoms of burnout. We hope that knowing more about what causes burnout will help you to mitigate this problem within your businesses.

Workplace stress happens when employees are feeling overworked and not properly supported. Feelings of anxiety, depression take a toll on one’s physical health. Employees with too much stress are often considered to have job burnout: where they are too overwhelmed by their responsibilities and their health declines.

In this series, we outlined one of the biggest workplace stressors: the amount of time and energy spent on e-mails.

How can our telephony services help you solve this problem?

Our telecommunication services can help your employees reduce stress and facilitate their work life by various means. Here are some examples:

Teleconferencing

Implement conference calls with your in- and out-of-office employees. Interactive project management, interoffice consulting, progress updates, fine-tuning and finalizing can all be done quickly and effectively over the phone. Deals can be done quicker in a conference call than having cross-country meetings. This can be done easily by setting up local numbers for everyone involved in a project’s process.

Making the most of virtual PBX

By shifting the time spent on sending e-mails to phone calls and narrowcasting within your company’s virtual PBX phone system, you can help to destress your employees. Voice recorded messages can help to unburden colleagues and employees from the overload of e-mails and instant messages they receive on an hourly basis.

• Offer a pre-recorded message at the start of each week for employees to phone in and listen to when it is convenient for them. In time-sensitive situations, record a message to be accessed only by those who need the information. This helps both the creator of the voice message who does not have to write a long email as well as the receiver who doesn’t have to deal with another e-mail.
• Even more, give your employees the freedom to create their own, clear boundaries around their availability when connected to the virtual PBX system. This can be done through time-date routing, where employees can leave pre-recorded messages to re-route phone calls if they are working on a particularly important project.

We can help you set up conference call, local phone numbers and a PBX system to make this happen company-wide, or even by department or team. Contact us today and let us know what issues you’re facing with your internal communications, and let us help you find the perfect solution!

For more information, read up on our Series on Stress and Mental Health to learn more about how your employees might be affected by stress in the workplace and what symptoms stress may cause.