Stress Management in the Workplace
The Stress Management in the Workplace training program delivers trademarked stress management tools that are unmatched in the measured results they will produce for you and your organization.
Stress management in the workplace requires more than helpful tips. Changing economic times have us pulled in multiple directions. The pressures and demands between work and personal life are blurred. As a result, the consequences of stress in the workplace come from what is happening to each of us both on and off the job.
Through highly interactive learning, participants apply these stress management training tools to getting more of what's important to them done in less time. Organizational skills are improved so that less things "fall through the cracks."
A realistic and positive Big Picture view is instilled that helps keep all stresses in perspective. Specific practical tools are learned that produce immediate results. Applications have a positive impact on stress levels both on and off the job.
In many countries, employers have a legal responsibility to recognise and deal with stress in the workplace so that employees do not become physically or mentally ill.
It is important to tackle the causes of stress in the workplace as stress at work can lead to problems for the individual, working relationships and the overall working environment. These issues may include lowered self-esteem and poor concentration skills for the employee. The employer may suffer from increasing customer complaints, staff turnover and days lost to sickness.
Managing stress in the workplace is therefore an essential part of both individual and corporate responsibility.
High levels of stress in the workplace can lead to:

* Poor decision-making. * An increase in mistakes which in turn may lead to more customer or client complaints. This in turn is likely to produce more stress. * Increased sickness and absence. * High staff turnover. * Poor employee/work place relations.

In the UK, the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) has issued a guide entitled Tackling stress: The Management Standards Approach (2005) which outlines six key areas of the workplace that should be monitored in order to assess levels of stress.
These key areas are: * Demands - Including such issues as workload, work patterns and work environment. * Control - How much say the person has in the way they do their work. * Support - Includes the encouragement, sponsorship and resources provided by the organisation, line management and colleagues. * Relationships - Includes promoting positive working to avoid conflict and dealing with unacceptable behaviour. * Role - Whether people understand their role within the organisation and whether the organisation ensures that the person does not have conflicting roles. * Change - How organisational change is managed and communicated within the organisation.
As a employee (in the UK), you are entitled to support for work place stress; therefore it would be useful for you to check your own working environment to see if any of the above areas is a cause for concern. You can find more detailed information about the HSE guidelines on stress on their website.

Not All Stress is Harmful
Stress affects people differently. Some people seem to thrive on extremely stressful lifestyles, while others struggle to cope with everyday life.
Everyone has an optimum level of stress. Too little excitement and too few challenges may lead to an extremely dull life, yet too much stress can lead to health problems. Nevertheless, a certain amount of stress can actually prove to be good for individuals.
Positive stress can act as a spur to achieve better results than would otherwise be attained, and no-one would wish to avoid such potentially stressful but enjoyable events as the birth of a child, forming new relationships or undertaking new challenges.
Stress is also extremely useful in acting as an enabler to avoid problems and dangers. It is a motivator to solve problems and is an important warning signal that something is wrong with an individual’s life, thereby allowing him or her to take some action.

Panic Attacks
In cases of extreme or continual stress, people can suffer what is known as a panic attack. This is a brief but extremely frightening spell of severe anxiety. Lasting only a few minutes, the symptoms can include: * Feeling faint. * Trembling. * Dizziness. * Pounding, fast heart rate. * Feeling hot and sweaty. * Legs turning to jelly. * Butterflies (a 'fluttery' feeling) in the stomach. * Shortness of breath. * Dry mouth.
Panic attacks often occur when the person is unaware of being particularly anxious. Recognising panic attacks for what they are, learning how to cope with them, and dealing with the underlying problems of stress are essential to the sufferer. Anyone who experiences such an attack should seek medical advice.

Short-Term Behaviours for Coping with Stress
When stressed, individuals often indulge in behaviours which may relieve the immediate feelings of anxiety in the short-term, but which only add to their problems in the longer term.
For example, alcohol, drugs, smoking and/or over-eating are often used to cope with immediate problems of stress. Avoiding, ignoring or failing to recognise underlying problems is also a common occurrence. When too many work demands are placed upon someone, he or she may work harder for longer hours and attempt to keep up with an impossible schedule instead of trying to reduce such demands. In the long term, such behaviours will only serve to increase the physiological symptoms of tension and deplete physical energy reserves.

Organizational Approaches to Managing Stress
Stress-related issues cost businesses billions of dollars per year in absenteeism, accidents, and lost productivity.[459] As a result, managing employee stress is an important concern for organizations as well as individuals. For example, Renault, the French automaker, invites consultants to train their 2,100 supervisors to avoid the outcomes of negative stress for themselves and their subordinates. IBM Corporation encourages its worldwide employees to take an online stress assessment that helps them create action plans based on their results. Even organizations such as General Electric Company (GE) that are known for a “winner takes all” mentality are seeing the need to reduce stress. Lately, GE has brought in comedians to lighten up the workplace atmosphere, and those receiving low performance ratings are no longer called the “bottom 10s” but are now referred to as the “less effectives.”[460] Organizations can take many steps to helping employees with stress, including having more clear expectations of them, creating jobs where employees have autonomy and control, and creating a fair work environment. Finally, larger organizations normally utilize outside resources to help employees get professional help when needed.
Make Expectations Clear
One way to reduce stress is to state your expectations clearly. Workers who have clear descriptions of their jobs experience less stress than those whose jobs are ill defined.[461] The same thing goes for individual tasks. Can you imagine the benefits of working in a place where every assignment was clear and employees were content and focused on their work? It would be a great place to work as a manager, too. Stress can be contagious, but as we’ve seen above, this kind of happiness can be contagious, too. Creating clear expectations doesn’t have to be a top–down event. Managers may be unaware that their directives are increasing their subordinates’ stress by upping their confusion. In this case, a gentle conversation that steers a project in a clearer direction can be a simple but powerful way to reduce stress. In the interest of reducing stress on all sides, it’s important to frame situations as opportunities for solutions as opposed to sources of anger.
Give Employees Autonomy
Giving employees a sense of autonomy is another thing that organizations can do to help relieve stress.[462] It has long been known that one of the most stressful things that individuals deal with is a lack of control over their environment. Research shows that individuals who feel a greater sense of control at work deal with stress more effectively both in the United States and in Hong Kong.[463] Similarly, in a study of American and French employees, researchers found that the negative effects of emotional labor were much less for those employees with the autonomy to customize their work environment and customer service encounters.[464] Employees’ stress levels are likely to be related to the degree that organizations can build autonomy and support into jobs.
Create Fair Work Environments
Work environments that are unfair and unpredictable have been labeled “toxic workplaces.” A toxic workplace is one in which a company does not value its employees or treat them fairly.[465] Statistically, organizations that value employees are more profitable than those that do not.[466] Research shows that working in an environment that is seen as fair helps to buffer the effects of stress.[467] This reduced stress may be because employees feel a greater sense of status and self-esteem or due to a greater sense of trust within the organization. These findings hold for outcomes individuals receive as well as the process for distributing those outcomes.[468] Whatever the case, it is clear that organizations have many reasons to create work environments characterized by fairness, including lower stress levels for employees. In fact, one study showed that training supervisors to be more interpersonally sensitive even helped nurses feel less stressed about a pay cut.[

Research Paper on Stress in the Workplace
This is a free example research paper on Stress in the Workplace:
Introduction
I am compiling this report, due to the low morale in the office. This low morale may be due to stress and could be affecting the company in terms of stress leading to a poor performance in employees. Stress is more commonly found in women and as this company employs sixty eight percent women; stress is a factor that needs to be made aware to the company. The basis of this report are from three articles related to stress, including women and stress, Health hazards – looking at stress, and monitor screens and work related stress. I believe that stress is directly affecting the company and this report will look at some ways to eliminate stress.
Findings
Stress in women
Research shows that women are more likely to be affected by stress than men. In fact four times as many women suffer from stress than men. This may be due to a number of reasons, for example due to a heavy work load, meeting deadlines and then out of work many women have a family to take care of, leaving little time for leisure. Stress does not only affect women though, men also get stress in the similar way.
Forms of stress
Stress can be categorised into three groups based on the severity of it. They are as follows:
Mild stress: This stress is a common form of stress and should not really be worried about. It is not harmful to ones health, and can also be beneficial as it can be a challenge for the employee, to reach the target on time with a slight pressure. This form of stress is very common in a company.
Acute stress: This is a more serious form of stress, and can in some cases affect ones health. This form of stress can be triggered by divorce, termination of employment, and bereavement as well as other reasons. The stress is build up from mild stress, and can leave an individual feeling as though demands and deadlines cannot be met.
Chronic stress: The most serious form of stress is chronic stress, as stress can build up to a point where an individual can no longer cope, seriously affecting their health and work. Examples of this kind of stress can be due to family problems, health problems or work related problems.
Over a period of time stress can affect people more seriously, in a non work related way. These forms of stress are psychologically and physiologically. Psychological problems may be feelings of guilt, resentfulness, loss of confidence and sense of perspective. Basically mental problems due to the build up of stress, people find it hard to cope with problems of work and home and this can in extreme cases lead to a nervous breakdown.
Whereas physiological problems are health problems such as high blood pressure, fatigue, digestive troubles, insomnia etc. One in four people in the UK die of heart disease, many of which were stress related cases. So companies need to do something to reduce stress in the office as they are often to blame for high levels of stress amongst employees.
Sitting in front a computer monitor all day can cause damaging effects to health. For example headaches, eye strain, epilepsy and an increased risk of miscarriage. A computer monitor is not entirely to blame for these health risks, it is a mixture of other factors due to an unhealthy environment. Poor lighting in an office can also lead to eye strain, chairs that do not provide enough back support can lead to back pains. Although some of these health hazards seem to be rather extreme, it is medically proven that a flickering screen can trigger an epileptic fit. Also working in unsatisfactory surrounds whilst pregnant, can lead to complications at birth.
Effects of stress on a company
Stress can affect a company badly, stress related illnesses account for four and five percent of absences among both men and women. The employee cannot work to their full potential when under stress, deadlines can be missed, absences rise leading to a bigger work load for the employee when they return to work. Companies can lose out in terms of profitability due to underperforming at work leading to problems within the company.
Conclusion
Companies can be blamed for high levels of stress within the office, this has been stated in this report. There are ways to lower the levels of stress in a company and they are as follows.
Employees with low job satisfaction often are poorly paid with few job promotion prospects. Company managers often fail to acknowledge their staff for their hard work which may lead to depression for the employee. If a employer recognises their employees work more and offer more promotion prospects, even an increase in an employees salary would help relieve stress in the office. Staff recognition is the key to every company, staff work better if their work is praised as they believe that they are a valued member of the company. Recognition may be verbal, where an employer simply praises their work verbally, or a promotion for the employee. Even staff events show that the manager cares about his staff, rather than the usual Christmas party more events out of work should be organised. If more recognition was shown to staff at Terra Firma then employee stress would be lowered and employees would perform better at work.
Redesigning jobs can also help, for example if employees take more breaks from the computer monitor to reduce headaches and eye strain, even performing other jobs away from the computer monitor every so often will minimise these health risks. Companies can also employ a stress councillor to help relieve stress from the employees, as this would not only benefit the employee health, but employees may perform better in their jobs, leading to better productivity and more profits for the company. If all or some of these suggestions were practised in Terra Firma then the company would certainly benefit, leading to a smooth running company, with fewer problems and low stress levels.