Stress causes almost half of all employee workplace related issues.
Low productivity, performance related incidents, continuous absences and employee turnover all lead back to this infamous aspect of facility management. In the end, the result is inefficiency.
How do facility managers manage workplace stress? They’re stressed out enough themselves, how do they coach their team through stress? How do you prevent stress related issues and incidents from occurring over and over again?
Keep reading, we’re confident we have the answer.
We know stress is a serious risk to an operation and all its employees. If not handled appropriately, stress can negatively affect employees’ performance and your bottom line.
Many employees are overworked without the tools necessary to complete job related activities and tasks. This leads to operational errors, overlooked equipment or location inspections, employees calling out sick, and several other acute problems affecting your facility. The effects can be severe.
When combined with a program for mitigating workplace stress, facility management software can naturally give managers a system for reducing workplace stress.
Confront Workplace Stress Head On
It’s vital to establish a permanent foundation for training and support in order for your team to overcome stress without any setbacks. The means for managing stress has to start with the facility manager. Define a plan of action that enhances awareness of precarious workplace stress.
As a proactive leader, define the ways stress will be stopped and how you can help your employees endure.
We endorse this approach:
- Assess the risk of stress for your facility.
- Train your supervisors and management team.
- Put your plan to ink.
- Implement facility management software.
Assess the risk of stress for your facility
Take the time to work through all of your processes, speak with all of your managers and employees to identify potential hazards. It’s important to receive feedback from all employees, because they might view stress at your facility differently than others. Certain employees may have specifics on unique forms of stress or are burdened with other variables outside of work.
Stress can surface from an inability to perform work effectively. Some employees might disregard performance issues or be too intimidated to mention their weaknesses. As their leader it’s important you identify these needs. This process will uncover the root of the problem.
Train your supervisors and management team
Schedule in-house continuing education for your team. Spend time with your management team on how to support engineers, technicians and frontline employees to isolate potential concerns, and how to confront them.
Training will enhance everyone’s awareness of stress, which could move from healthy to detrimental for your employees and the overall work environment. Extra training and support allows you to reduce the chances of unwanted stress taking control of your operation.
Put your plan to ink
Produce directives and firm procedures that illustrate your facility’s mission to proactively develop a stress-free work environment for staff. We believe that communicating your awareness of the dangers and effects of stress in the workplace will give your employees some comfort.
Attacking stress head on will build your team’s confidence in you as a leader. As you spearhead these initiatives, fuel their confidence with more action and more results. Results are crucial. Talking about your plans to overcome stress doesn’t provide the same impact as actually doing something about. Do something about it.
Implement facility management software
Eliminating the impact of unhealthy stress can be accomplished with the application of a software solution. Use it to take the added steps out of tedious and routine activities and tasks. Lower overall employee pressure to perform efficiently and effectively with automation and less paperwork.
We’re going to show you how software can help facilities become a low stress setting that moves your maintenance to a profit center.
A Facility Management Software Duo
A large part of workplace stress comes from your staff’s inability to perform necessary activities as efficiently as possible. But what causes that? A lack of resources and tools to accomplish this.
That’s how we know enhancing your total operation will constructively influence your team. Two solutions for your facility we urge you to focus on are:
- Maintenance software
- Equipment inspection software
You’ll get all you need to empower your staff. Now you need to understand that getting software where the software talks to one another is vital to your objective. When you implement software that integrates you get one seamless operation.
No questions, less errors, reduced stress. Easy enough, right? Of course it is!
Value associated with maintenance and equipment inspection software is nearly endless, but rather than embellishing a bit, we’re going to nail down 8 ways the two solutions can help all facility managers lower their workplace stress and have peace of mind.
With easy-to-use maintenance and inspection systems you remove the cumbersomeness out of facility maintenance, and with it you get endless value over time:
- No more work order reports with illegible handwritten notes piling up on your desk. Your team will be humming along as you create, track, edit, and automatically communicate work orders.
- Engineers, technicians and other frontline employees can quickly request work to be done. Create a web form for your facility so that staff can submit work orders for approval directly into the maintenance solution. Make it all easy. Make the headaches go away…forever.
- Once work order requests come into your maintenance system, they’ll enroll into your chain of command for an efficient line of approval. Depending on the type of work order you might want to determine who approves what type and for what amount. Spend less time worrying about planning work you need to get done – and get it done! No sweat.
- We’ve done a deep dive into how preventive maintenance moves your maintenance from a cost center to a profit center. Now use it to take your maintenance from a high-stress environment to a low-stress or stress-free one. Shoot, why not, right? Create your maintenance activities and tasks with ease. Then make the rest of the process even easier for your people. Schedule everything on a calendar for routine tracking and execution. AUTO-MATION, yeah.
- Produce and deliver digital checklists to your technicians. Now you have ultimate control and consistency of all maintenance activities occurring at your facility. It’s that consistency that eliminates all those questions we mentioned before. Your staff will perform without hesitation.
- Using digital checklists, your equipment inspection software easily removes the guesswork and accountability concerns out of conducting inspections. This lowers YOUR stress. Equipment inspection software increases your staff’s efficiency. Using RFID technology they can quickly scan labels attached to equipment, review checklists, pass or fail an inspection, and attach associated pictures, video, audio and verified signatures for future analysis.
- Oh wait, your team found a piece of faulty equipment before its routine inspection? No stress…they’ll quickly generate a work order directly from the mobile handheld device of your inspection software. Original challenges posed by conducting equipment inspections are gone. May those challenges rest in peace. Because now you have peace of mind. The barriers begin to dissipate, and you’re left with facility management for the 21st century. You’ll finally have accurate and correct documentation – you can use!
- You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Analytics is one of our favorites, so we saved the best for last. Maintenance and equipment software that talks to one another and offers up analytics, well, those are systems you can use. In your effort to remove stress completely, now you have the valuable information useful to you. Making smarter management decisions to increase operational efficiency all while giving employees a serene work environment, doesn’t have to be an exhausting process.
Over to You
Whether you already have a number of processes and actions in place for workplace stress, use this article as a tool for you to measure your efforts to move towards a stress-free workplace AND to see how clear your message is being delivered.
To answer our question of how facility managers handle workplace stress: they build an operational foundation and supplement it with the most effective and intuitive software solutions. It really is as simple as that.
With the combination of your processes and analytics, you’re eliminating questions and misunderstandings or anything else you can possibly think of that hinders your team’s success.
Because when you take the guesswork out of the job and give your employees a clear path for action, people tend to be happy about that. Everyone likes happy people. We know we do.
