Doing More With Stress

"Doing More With Stress"

My Job Here is Done™ Transcript (for general use only – machine-generated and it may not be accurate.) 

Dave (00:01) Hey, to all my leadership friends. Have you thanked your team enough for the incredible job they did and are still doing after COVID rocked the business world?

Kelli (00:11) I bet not.

Dave (00:12) Why do you say that?

Kelli (00:13) I've been in the thick of it for over two years now and I can tell you firsthand that I've rarely seen the proper payback and appreciation for doing more with stress. But we keep plugging away because the people I surround myself with have an ethic and a drive to always do the right thing, always help others, and never let ourselves or our customers down.

Dave (00:36) You said stress.

Kelli (00:38) What do you mean?

Dave (00:39) You said doing more with stress? It's doing more with less.

Kelli (00:43) Is that what you and your leadership friends think? That your teams just do more with less? Just that simple?

Dave (00:51) Ut oh.

Kelli (00:52) In the beginning of COVID, all of our teams did more with less and I think I can say for everyone, we were happy to do it. But it seems like now doing more with less is the new normal. So everyone's working harder, not really feeling appreciated or recognized as they had been in the past, often islanded or isolated, and yet expected to produce results in the wild. Oh yeah. Doing more with stress.

Dave (01:17) Well then that's what we're going to talk about today. And we'll take a layman's look at the medical aspect of stress and how it physically affects your team members. We have a story or two about stress relief practices we've seen work, and together, hopefully, this will spark some ideas for you to put into practice to help alleviate what might be a silent and hidden problem for you and your business.

Kelli (01:42) ProTip: A good start here is to never push loyal employees to the point where they no longer care.

INTRO (01:50) Hi, I'm Dave and I've been starting and running businesses all my life. And I'm Kelli, working for the man like a dog for decades. And you are YOU! The driven career professional clawing your way up the ladder of success, maybe running your own business. The next 20 minutes or so is just for you. Welcome to My Job Here Is Done.

Dave (02:14) Well, welcome and thanks a lot for taking a break to give us about 20 minutes of your time today, I'm Dave

Kelli (02:20) and I'm Kelli and we talk about career success and entrepreneurial business growth on this podcast, subscribe or follow us on your favorite app. We don't want you to miss any new episodes

Dave (02:31) and you can interact with the lovely and talented Kelly and I personally at our website, my Job Here is Done.com, and on social media at my Job podcast. This is the one about doing more with less

Kelli (02:45) stress!! Stress!!!

Dave (02:47) doing more with stress. Stress and what that means to leadership and your business's ongoing growth and success. We'll talk a little about pushing people to their limits and how to spot an employee who's in trouble when you can no longer see them face to face each day in this new world.

Kelli (03:04) This isn't going to be a how hard I work bitch session. It's a reminder for all of us that many things influence the happiness, effectiveness, stress, and health of your teams, of your managers, and ultimately, customer perception.

Dave (03:18) Interesting last thought there. We're talking about how to do more with less or more with stress and how that has an impact on your employees. But you added in that it has an impact on customers, too.

Kelli (03:32) Yes, because happy, appreciated, and engaged employees make your customers feel appreciated and valuable. If employees are unhappy, your customers will be, too.

Dave (03:42) You're right.

Kelli (03:43) Let's look at a little history here because what we are going through today is a unique and sudden shift in our modern business landscape.

Dave (03:51) Yeah, and we're not done with it yet. We're not done with it yet.

Kelli (03:54) As a result of COVID, which had no playbook to reference, we had to make things up as we went along. And for the most part, I think businesses around the world did a pretty good job initially.

Dave (04:04) Yeah. Quick story. I was lucky enough to be in the driver's seat of a company's sudden shift to remote work due to Covet. When I was brought on shortly before anyone had even heard the term COVID, my task was to reorganize the operations and customer service part of the company. It needed a pretty major tune-up and better processes, better measurements, and better leadership. And sales were struggling, and customer churn was on the rise.

Kelli (04:29) Was this part of a bigger plan for the company?

Dave (04:32) it was, there were a lot of changes being made, but operations had a large part. Actually, it had the vast majority of the employee base. So my responsibilities and commitments touched the lives of almost 90% of the employees located across three countries.

Kelli (04:49) Yeah, I recall that you didn't even get the opportunity to dig into your projects before COVID hit.

Dave (04:54) Nope, that's exactly right. I did get a new leadership team in place right before COVID and thank goodness for that. They were a great group and when we saw what was going on with COVID, it became very clear that it was going to be an extremely disruptive event for a while. But for how long? Nobody knew.

Kelli (05:12) Nobody knew. I remember getting sent home in March of 2020, and I thought to myself, hey, this is great. I can work at home for a few weeks. I've never had the opportunity to work from home in the past, and I was really excited to give it a try.

Dave (05:25) Yeah, well, my last flight on an airline outside to that particular company that I was consulting for was in March. I think it was March 16 of 2020. But I did have one thing going for me, and that was that I personally, being a consultant for a lot of years, and working from home for a lot of years, this wasn't new to me.

Dave (05:47) I mean, the whole concept of working from one location or from anywhere, that wasn't new to me, now, sending people home en mass, that was new to everybody. Yeah, but it is new for a lot of people never doing it before. And it was going to be a really big challenge for me and the team to figure out how to run a business with almost nobody there suddenly. Right? And don't skip a beat. It was stressful.

Kelli (06:18) Right. And it was all new to me. And I loved it at first. I was getting so much more done. I had more time in my day since I didn't have to commute or get ready for work in the morning. I felt less pressure and literally, nobody bothered me at that point. I actually felt less stressed.

Dave (06:34) Kelli, you also sound like you loved it at first. Did something change?

Kelli (06:37) Yeah. The honeymoon started to wear off about six weeks in for me. I'm a people person, and I missed seeing "some" people in person. The systems that were set up for us to replace meetings and events were kind of buggy and hard to use, and there was no training. We couldn't access our desk phones, et cetera. It was a little bit of a mess, and worse, we were getting more and more work piled on. Sometimes work that we were unfamiliar with as colleagues left and were not replaced.

Dave (07:07) Hey, girl, just figure it out!!

Kelli (07:10) Yes. It was starting to feel like it was impossible to do a great job because of the volume of work. And the stress started to set in. And it was unlike any other stress I've ever felt. It was a new level of stress. And as time marched on, it was consistent stress. The only change was that it continued to ramp up.

Dave (07:29) and everybody was probably asking what's the plan?

Kelli (07:33) Leadership struggled as it was a whole new world of challenges for them as well.

Dave (07:38)  Those are common problems all over. Your leadership struggled through really no fault of their own. Nobody really expected this pandemic or anything even like it. And like we mentioned earlier, there was no contingency plan for something like this. In business, you always plan for stuff, but the stuff that you plan for never happens. Well Hello COVID!

Kelli (07:59) Right.

Dave (08:00) So there was going to be a period of unknown, mistakes being made, and frequent course corrections that look to some as floundering.

Kelli (08:08) After a few months in, it was getting pretty evident that we all had to do more with less on a permanent basis. Some teams lost employees, mostly to trim costs, but it was apparent to everyone that if you wanted to keep your job, you're going to have to do more with stress.

Dave (08:24) My plate is already full, folks. Well, get a bigger plate. Some had the drive to stuff their plate with more, and some didn't -- just get a bigger plate.

Kelli (08:37) I just kept thinking well, this is going to be over soon. It's temporary. It's been six months now. Things are going to go back to normal pretty quickly. How wrong was I?

Dave (08:48) Yeah, well, we are years into COVID now. The tools we use to replace in-person events are pretty well in place. The world as we know it everywhere knows the term Zoom and Teams and Slack, and they know these terms all too well. And most of the indecisiveness from leadership is now at a dull roar from where it originally was.

Kelli (09:11) Yeah.

Dave (09:11) So, Kelli, how's your 'tude doing now?

Kelli (09:14) Well, after getting through the rough period, I'm now one of those people who love working from anywhere, and I appreciate the challenges and the work I do more than ever.

Dave (09:25) But you're not thrilled about it?

Kelli (09:28) No, not in one important aspect. And so many others just like me are not thrilled about this either. I think generally and collectively as employees, we feel we expanded and adapted to fit the needs of the company during the crisis, doing more with less. But the company has not expanded and adapted to fit our needs after the crisis while we do more with stress.

Dave (09:51) Right. And the crisis isn't even over yet.

Kelli (09:54) It depends on how you look at it. And I bet a bunch of you listening feel this way. For me personally, I'm just done with the pandemic. I've done everything I was told to do to help stop this crisis. I vaxed myself silly. I masked my mask. My hands look like sterile prunes, and I buy my own printer ink online to avoid everybody at the local office supply shop like the plague. Jeez, I've been at work remotely every day. I avoided COVID for over 800 days and counting, so there's literally nothing else I can do pandemic-wise. That said, my stress level is at the Max, and the same thing goes for my colleagues. We're all doing more with stress!

Dave (10:35) Hearing that concerns me because everyone handles the health risks of stress differently, some much better than others.

Kelli (10:43) For me, I'm self controlling my stress levels fairly well. It is what it is. I'm back to living my life with just a little black, COVID cloud hanging over me everywhere you go. Yeah, I try my best to destress about things at work, and I'm done letting CCOVID influence my every step.

Dave (11:00) Hey, good for you. That's a great and healthy attitude. And you know I feel the same, right?

Kelli (11:05) But I do worry about others who may not be able to shake all this off. People who need encouragement, that need to feel more appreciated, especially at work, who are just tired of doing more with stress and not handling it well.

Dave (11:18) Doing more with less is elastic in nature. You can stretch it to make it work for a while, but if you stretch it too far or too long, you can snap just like a rubber band. And that's where the stress creeps in. As leaders and managers, we were caught off guard with COVID and we operationalized and corrected for COVID's ill effects on our day-to-day business.

Dave (11:43) It took us a few years to get that right. But now there's part two, we need to correct for the stress our teams have been under and focus as much energy and resources to correct that problem as we did to correct and keep our businesses running in the beginning.

Kelli (12:01) The Great Resignation is not about employees not liking their jobs and quitting. It's about employees not liking their new job and a half that extra half or more that's stressing them. There are only so many hours in the day, so instead of falling behind, employees are expanding their workday hours into their personal and family time to fill the gap, escalating their stress.

Dave (12:25) How true that is.

Kelli (12:26) I mentioned earlier, it's not a good idea to push loyal employees to the point where they no longer care. The result is the Great Resignation. I'm watching that happen every day, and the effect that has on a person's mental health is troubling, to say the least.

Dave (12:40) Hey, we've talked about this type of employee crisis before on our podcast. Check out the episodes "Should I Stay or Should I Go", "Work Life Balance. I'm not in the Mood." And one of our most popular episodes. "Okay, everyone, back to the office."

Kelli (12:55) Today's message is complementary in some ways to what we shared in those episodes, but it's also very different. Today, we're not talking about day-to-day efficiencies, new ideas to try, and the cause and effect of your actions as a leadership team. Today, we're talking about your employee's mental health.

Dave (13:12) Hey, stop. Don't tune out. Don't say there's an HR function or EAP program function to solve this. Please don't say I don't have that problem in my business ... you probably do it's there and you need to hear this. Just hang on for another few minutes.

Dave (13:31) As a leader, as HR, or as employee relations. Prior to COVID, when people were mostly in the workplace working next to each other, eating pizza together in meetings, and doing personal one-on-one, you had numerous inputs available to assess the health and wellbeing of your team members.

Kelli (13:50) It was easier to see if a person was struggling because you your team. Everyone saw them every day. You could see the expression on their face. You and others around them could see if a pattern of behavior changed. The area around the water cooler was full of gossip and rumors. Today, all those things are almost completely cloaked behind a dark Zoom screen.

Dave (14:12) As leaders, we would modulate the amount and type of work we tasked our team members to take on by acting on signals we would get from those team members. For instance, you might have heard through the grapevine that Sally's father had passed away. And even if you didn't acknowledge that directly, you might have cut her some slack. You might have also noticed that Jim looked a little moody, and mopey at his desk, and you simply asked, "hey, Jimbo, how you doing?" Little things like that added up to helping people cope. We help other people cope because, hey, we're human and that's what we do.

Kelli (14:50) And how do you do that? Now? Situations like that are nearly impossible to notice or react to remotely. And the amount of water-cooler type chatting has gone to zero with likely no alternatives.

Dave (15:02) People are not interacting with each other like before. And while we made it convenient to have video meetings Asana project plans, 1000 Slack channels, we as leadership largely forgot about the social interaction that disappeared with COVID and made inadequate provisions for alternatives and have unintentionally created a huge problem of doing more with stress.

Kelli (15:28) We all tried. Here are a few things that I've done personally to attempt to touch base with my colleagues. I start meetings early so that I have time to check-in and socialize with my friends before a video meeting starts. I also try to schedule in-person lunches with individual team members on a regular basis. I random text people, not using work email.

Dave (15:54) All you listeners out there, you're going to get a random text from Kelli! I have no idea what you should expect!! (laughing) 

Kelli (16:00) I just pick a number out of the air and hope that it's somebody. No, I randomly text my coworkers, friends, my team members, and I intentionally don't use work email, but I text, so it's more personal. And I ask them, hey, how's your day? How's your day going? How are you? What's new?

Kelli (16:19) And here's something else I've read about, but I haven't tried yet. But I'm going to.

Dave (16:24) Okay.

Kelli (16:24) And that is scheduling the meeting about nothing, where you invite team members to a virtual meeting and you talk about personal things, vacation plans, what you do on the weekend? Anything but work?

Dave (16:37) Kelli's point here is important because we should be helping to augment a social network for our remote teams. And like Kelli, here's another example. I did almost what you were talking about. I made a policy during the beginning portion of the pandemic where I knew that this was not just going to be a couple of weeks. We were all locked down. And I made a policy that any employee could use our corporate Zoom account for personal use at any time. Invite their family, their friends, everybody, to help encourage socialization between colleagues after work, having virtual get-togethers with friends and family. And my favorite. And we did this a lot. We would go to the virtual bar.

Kelli (17:18) Very nice.

Dave (17:19) I mean, literally, we'd have a whole bunch of people on the screen, and everybody would be having their glass, raising the glass, and having their favorite cocktail. It was pretty cool.

Kelli (17:27) So as good as those ideas were, it's far from enough. Especially now. I think you have to go much further to mitigate the unhealthy stressors that are present today. To understand stressors in the workplace, it's really helpful to quickly look at physiology - that's when the body is working normally -and pathophysiology, when the body is not working normally caused by events such as stress.

Dave (17:51) You may think that stress is just a word we use to describe a person who is under unusual pressure. It is. But some stress can be good for you and is normal. Or stress can be a medical emergency in a person or anywhere in between those two extremes.

Kelli (18:07) I hear people say things like, Stress doesn't bother me and I don't get stressed. Well, good for you. Maybe. Your body handles stress differently than most people. You may have a higher tolerance for stressful situations, and if so, you're in the minority right now.

Dave (18:23) Let's break this down a little bit further. There is good stress. The term for good stress is eustress. It's spelled E-U-S-T-R-E-S-S. Eustress. It's the intense feeling you get from riding that exciting roller coaster.

Kelli (18:38) I love roller coasters.

Dave (18:40) I know you do. The wooden ones that rattle all over the place. We did a podcast on roller coasters.

Kelli (18:45) Right.

Dave (18:45) Or winning the lottery.

Kelli (18:47) Oh, I love winning the lottery.

Dave (18:50) When have you ever won the lottery?

Kelli (18:52) Never. But I'd love it.

Dave (18:55) Or the feeling that you get when you make an important score in a sports event.

Kelli (19:00) I love scoring in sports events.

Dave (19:01) Just waiting for that. These feelings come when the body's sympathetic nervous system kicks in and releases hormones. You've heard of them, like endorphins and adrenaline, amongst other things. It makes you feel great for a period of time and then, as you know, it wears off.

Kelli (19:19) Distress the opposite of eustress, or simply stress, has two main flavors acute or short amounts of stress and chronic or long-term stress. An example of short-term or acute stress is being scared by something.

Kelli (19:37) Thanks for the extra stress, Dave. Yeah, no problem.

Kelli (19:41) When that happens, the same nervous system component kicks in with adrenaline and cortisol, flooding the body to prepare you for defending yourself in that situation. You may have heard of it as a fight or flight response. You breathe faster, your heart beats faster. Pupils in your eyes dilate. Your muscles get more blood flow to them. All so you can run away fast or have extra spurts of energy or strength to fight off the danger to protect yourself.

Dave (20:09) We've all been there, that heart-pounding nervous rush that only lasts a few moments. Imagine if that lasted for hours or days. You wouldn't be able to function.

Kelli (20:20) And here's the thing. Your body doesn't always recognize the actual stressor or the reason for the stress response. It acts almost the same no matter what. It doesn't care if you're being threatened by a Tiger or if you have too much pressure on you to complete a task, or risk losing your job! They both trigger a hormonal stress response.

Dave (20:44) So what's bad about stress? Can't you just shake it off? Well, the answer is no, but you can seem to get used to it in some cases.

Dave (20:54) Medical experts agree stress is always damaging your body. If stress is constant, as it is when employees spend the majority of their day in the stressful 'doing more with less' environment. Stress can cause headaches, dizziness, all sorts of out-of-sorts feelings, stomach issues, and GI problems. It can raise blood pressure, and increase insulin and sugar levels. And these things have weird effects on the body.

Dave (21:21) It weakens the immune system and could be the cause of frequent call-outs from work. And it causes sadness, agitation, depression, lack of focus, and even panic attacks.

Dave (21:33) In other words, Besides being really damaging to your body and health, chronically stressed-out employees are damaging your business.

Kelli (21:41) Unhealthy attempts to cope with stress can lead to using alcohol or drugs, both prescribed and recreational, in an attempt to self-medicate to counteract the above symptoms. Or it may cause you to do reckless things that have short thrills like gambling or overeating or other compulsive behaviors, none of which are good for you.

Dave (22:02) There are always stressors at work. They are a part of life. But unreasonable or excessive work stressors can literally demoralize a workforce. And please take note, that it's likely happening to your employees right now. As you listen to this podcast.

Kelli (22:18) Think about this leadership, HR, and the legal Department. They all go out of their way to make sure employees don't get physically hurt on the job. They make sure floors aren't slippery, and eyewash and first aid kits are available. Even heart defibrillators are commonplace. Some go as far as making sure we promote good posture to avoid back problems by funding expensive chairs and workstations.

Dave (22:42) We have required safety training just to check the box. And there's a litany of forms to use if a team member gets physically hurt on the job. But we don't give the same attention to the hurt and harm that comes from employee stress. And as leadership, we unintentionally create this hazard.

Kelli (23:03) Doing more with less is fine as long as it's a sprint and not a marathon, like  a temporary effort to get a business over the hump. If doing more with less becomes - or even seems - like it's permanent, then for everyone, it morphs into doing more with stress. And stress can kill your workforce and your business.

Dave (23:23) Thanks very much for listening today. We hope you enjoyed our story about doing more with stress. More and more people listen each week just because of you spreading the word about the podcast. So thanks very much for telling a friend about us

Kelli (23:37) and to make that stress free for your friend, let them know they can follow us anywhere and everywhere podcasts are available using their favorite app, or at our website, MyJobHereIsDone DOT com

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