How to handle Stress in your Workplace
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Like most callcenter managers, you are probably ready for a relaxing weekend (as long as their are no emergencies at the site). Here is an article by Greg Frost in which you will find tips for relieving Monday’s stress.
With the fast advancement of technology, the stresses faced at work have also increased. Many people dislike going to work, hence the term “Monday Blues”. What is the reason for this? There is partly the fear from being retrenched during strenuous times, leading to greater job insecurity on the part of those who remain. Undoubtedly, occupational stress is one of the most commonly cited stressors faced by people all over the world.
Stress refers to the pressure and reactions to our circumstances around us which results in psychological and physical reactions. While some stress is beneficial for motivation and increasing efficiency, excessive stress can result in negative impacts such as lessened effectiveness and efficiency. There is an increasing number of people are feeling isolated and disrespected at work, and this has led to greater occupational stress. Many companies have taken to consulting experts and professionals on ways to improve connectedness and morale of their employees.
Some companies organize parties and make an effort to allow their employees feel valued at work. These are methods to encourage employees and help them to feel secure at their jobs, which would translate into greater productivity. However, not every company have such measures in place, and some have not gotten it quite right. Hence, it is your choice to ensure that you can cope with stress at your workplace, and utilize it to help you work better. Here are 3 simple steps to help you with coping with stress in the workplace.
Step #1: Raising Awareness
Help yourself to identify when you are facing rising levels of stress, tipping the scales from positive to negative. This is important, as being able to identify signs of being stressed can help you to take the necessary precautions to ensure that your overall quality of life does not drop. If left unacknowledged, the problem will only grow bigger, leading to dire consequences to your health and overall wellbeing.
You can identify if you are stressed up by checking if you have any physical or psychological reactions, such as excessive sweatingor increasing heart palpitations, or the onset of headaches, being irritated or the want to run away. If you experience any of these reactions, identify if you are feeling any overwhelming negative emotions, and if you are constantly worried.
Step #2: Identify the Cause
You have to be able to analyze the situation and identify what is causing the rise in stress. These stressors can be both external and internal. External stressors refer to things beyond your control, such as the environment or your colleagues at work. Internal stressors refers to your personal thinking and attitude. Often, we only start reacting to stress when a combination of stressors working together goes beyond our threshold.
Keep a diary or a list of events that have caused you to experience strong negative emotions, or those that are likely stressors. This will help you to identify the reasons behind your stress. While it is not always possible to eradicate them, we can change the way that we cope with it.
Step #3: Coping with Stress
In order to tackle the situation that is causing you stress, you need to calm your mind and body so as to stave off the reactions and cope with it in a positive way. This can be through different methods, such as taking time off. If a situation is causing your stress and you are unable to calm down, move away from it. Head outside and take a walk to calm down. Alternatively, you can try implementing relaxation techniques such as deep breathing. If it is an internal stressor, stop your thought process until you are able to deal with it logically.
The key to making these 3 steps work for you is to practice them. These are not instantaneous solutions, and you need to condition your mind and practice them so that you can implement it when you are feeling stressed.
What Everybody Should Know To Be An Effective Public Speaker
Many managers (call center and others) will say that they would rather have a root canal than speak in front of a conference. Here are a few tips for you to use if and when it is your turn to take the podium.
Public speaking is not easy. It is a challenge, both an art and a science and to deliver a good speech it has to be effective and make an impact on your audience. These are the steps which you need to take to ensure you make this impact.
Public speaking is not easy. It is a challenge, both an art and a science and to deliver a good speech it has to be effective and make an impact on your audience.
These are the steps which you need to take to ensure you make this impact:
You need to be prepared
You need to understand fully what you are talking about. Research and familiarise yourself with the topic and make sure you are presenting only one main idea, so that your audience are not sidetracked when listening to you and therefore forget what you are presenting. A good way to check your take on the topic, is to see if you would feel confident in answering any questions that you might get asked after your talk.
Make sure your speech is organised into a logical sequence. This will make it easier for your audience to follow and understand you, therefore keeping them interested. They will also find it easier to remember. If you also back your speech up with solid evidence it will help to add credibility to your talk.
The two most important parts of a speech to help captivate your audience are the introduction and conclusion. The introduction is the first contact the audience will have with you and needs to be strong and tempt them to want to listen. The conclusion of the speech will sum up your talk and be the last part that the audience hear. This needs to remind them that you were a great speaker and one that they would recommend to others and come to see again themselves. Therefore it is a good idea to write down on paper, your opening and closing words. It is also good to add real life stories as much as possible into the speech, as they go down well too with the audience.
Once you have your speech outlined and your notes written out, you need to practice your speech, to make sure you are happy with the content, the flow of the words and check whether the timing is correct, ie. fits in the timescale allotted to you. Also, the more you practice, the more confident you will feel when you deliver. To make sure you don’t just read from your notes when you present, outline the main points on you sheet that you will need to prompt you. That way you can scan the whole room whilst you present your speech, involving your whole audience whilst speaking loudly and clearly.
You should now be ready to go out a give the speech the audience want to hear and you can be proud of!
Andrew Rondeau transformed himself from a $4 an-hour petrol-pump attendant to a highly successful Senior Manager earning $500k every year.
Discover how you can remove your fear and reduce your stress of being a new manager by receiving Andrew’s free Management e-Course and report: http://www.greatmanagement.org/
What New Managers Should Know About Managing Their Time
Here is an article written by Andrew Rondeau to help new managers manage their time more effectively. Sounds like a gift for new call center managers!
Do wish there were 27 hours in every day instead of 24? This article will give you some tips to help you manage your time.
For some people it doesn’t seem to matter how long their day is. They just never seem to have enough time. The clock is ticking and it’s ticking too fast for comfort. It feels like they have a million things to do, a couple thousand of which were actually due last week and every new task is urgent and can’t wait…
Sounds familiar? Well if it does, you might be one of those people who just don’t have a very good relationship with time. It is often a sign that you’re not in control of your own day-planner. You may have some things on your to do list that you set out to accomplish, but anything and everything that you come across interferes with your plans. Someone or something else seems to be claiming your time to the extent that you never seem to get anything done. You might be asking yourself: "How can I possibly get everything done?" Good question. The answer is very simple: "You can’t and you shouldn’t want to".
Wanting to get everything done is probably the main reason why so many people are short on time. They’re trying to do too many things and fail to realise that there are only so many tasks that one person can accomplish in a day. Instead of focusing on getting everything done, focus on those things that really need to get done. Separating what’s important from what’s not important will help you prioritise your tasks. In addition, once you’ve done this, just remember that priorities are in order. That means that when you’re working on something with a high priority it is okay to turn down someone asking you to do something that has a lower priority. Learning to say "no” is a huge time-saver. Of course, you can also say "no" to yourself when you find yourself tempted to interrupt your work for another task that pops up. You will find that if you focus on the most important task that needs to get done during the day, the major things, you will probably have enough time left to fit in some of the minor things.
Time is an area where we can be absolutely sure that everyone is treated equally. No matter where you’re from or what your background is, everybody has the same amount of hours in a day. The difference is in how we choose to spend those hours. And that is why some people are considered miracle workers while others never get anything accomplished. Perhaps you’ve heard the story of the business consultant giving this simple piece of advice to one of his clients. His client was a CEO of a large corporation who felt he and his management team wasn’t performing to their best abilities. They just didn’t seem to get the work done. The consultant listened intently for a while and then gave the following advice:
"Every night before your head hits the pillow, take a piece of paper and write down the six most important tasks you must accomplish the next day. Write them down in the order of importance. Then the next day, it at all possible, start on the first task and don’t move on to the next task until the first has been finished. This may not always be possible because sometimes the most important thing can be something that comes up later during the day. For instance your most important task may be a certain presentation that is scheduled to take place somewhere late in the afternoon. In that case, you would move on to point number two. You wouldn’t want to be sitting idle all day, right?"
When the client asked for the price of this advice, he was told to simply put in into practice and then determine the value himself. After a certain period of time had past the client wired an amount of $25,000 to the business consultant. Apparently, this little piece of advice had worked out quite well for him and the members of his management team. Do this for a while and you will see your effectiveness soar. A great side effect is that people around you are bound to see it too.
Become more efficient in your communication. This means: on the phone, in emails or letters, and of course in face-to-face conversations. A lot of time spent in communication is very inefficient. This is especially wasteful because you’re not just wasting your own time but also somebody else’s.
Touch everything only once. This can be a really great time-saver. Every piece of information should preferably pass through your hands only once. This goes for mail, email, but also things like certain websites, articles, newspapers and other sources of information.
In order to do this successfully you will need to learn how to take decisions quickly. Some decisions just aren’t worth too much of your valuable time. The ability to take decisions is the key to becoming successful anyway. So why wouldn’t you want to speed that process up a little. The ability to take decisions quickly, especially minor ones, will free up a lot of time that can be spent on things that are more important. Aside from that, it increases self-confidence, which will help you when making decisions on issues that are more important.
Making Average Managers Into Outstanding Ones
Becoming a successful manager is easy…just copy those who are already successful. Check out these tips…
Do you want to be the best manager around and earn the respect you deserve?
Do you want to motivate your staff, increase their productivity and be a super-successful manager?
Top successful managers never overlook this fact: loyal, productive employees are one of your biggest assets. From corporate cubicles to the factory floor, it’s the collective skills and efforts of YOUR staff that keep your operation going. Thus, mastering the art of employee motivation techniques is crucial to maintaining a work environment that is good for both the company and the employees.
You can easily set the right tone in the workplace by learning to respond to a basic need we all share… which is to be respected and valued.
Everyone wants to be treated with respect. And as a company owner or manager, your words, body language, even your facial expressions can make a huge difference in how employees perceive your opinion of them. For instance, extending common courtesies such as a "Good morning" or a nod as you pass workers in the hallway says to them that they are not invisible to you. Other demonstrations of respect could include asking employees for suggestions to improve operations and/or management. It’s another way of saying, "I respect and value your opinions." Even offering constructive criticism, in private, to a worker who may have missed the mark says, "I respect you enough not to embarrass you in front of your co-workers…"
Two powerful words are important in employee motivation… "Great Job!". By recognising the work of others, you motivate them to keep working. You’ll find that regularly giving verbal or written praise for a job well done goes a long way in making employees feel appreciated. If workers feel that they play an important part in the company by the work they provide, then they are much more likely to seek ways to improve their performance.
While cash incentives are a sure way to put a smile on an employee’s face, there are other creative ways to motivate employees through "thoughtful" gestures. For individual rewards, how about gift certificates for DVD rentals, music CD purchases, theme park tickets or "Dinner for 2"? For group or departmental appreciations, consider a "Leave Work 30 Minutes Early Next Friday" reward. Or once-a-month, provide treats in honour of those celebrating birthdays in that calendar month. You are limited only by your imagination and budget.
Placing respect, recognition and reward at the heart of your employee motivation efforts will serve to boost morale, increase productivity and positively affect the company’s bottom-line.
Andrew Rondeau transformed himself from a $4 an-hour petrol-pump attendant to a highly successful Senior Manager earning $500k every year.
Discover how you can remove your fear and reduce your stress of being a new manager by receiving Andrew’s free Management e-Course and report: http://www.greatmanagement.org/
