“What can we do to ease down stress levels among our employees?”

It depends on each company’s atmosphere and policies currently set up for employees. It would be best to do an onsite assessment, and take surveys from employees. Certainly, minimizing stressful environment, boosting moral in positive ways and interactions, helping your employees feel heard and cared for, eliminating toxic workplace cultures or employees, and counseling opportunities for employees with history of stress/trauma events. There is so much to consider. Let me know if you would like to discuss an onsite consultation. Take care!

Consider an ergonomic evaluation of your workspace. This can be done in person, or if you are seeking virtual evaluation, please connect!

Almost every job has unique and unfamiliar stresses to it. Environmental health practitioners can design stress-free environments and plan individual and organizational stress management programs. It is our responsibility as employers to bring down or ease the work-related stress and protect our employees from the beginning, even when we manage and start the hiring process. It is essential to remind the individual who chooses to join our organizational work that nothing significant in the world has ever been accomplished without passion. Passion is an energy, it is what drives us to do what we enjoy. So it is essential that the individual, when offered the opportunity to work, has the choice to decide whether or not that job is where their passion lies. Employers should then invest in the organizational infrastructure of the prereplacement examination, provide a necessary job description, expectations, resources, and, moving forward, invest in the development of their employee's skills. Employers also have to evaluate the work enviroment periodically as well as examine the employees. We call it the "periodic monitoring examination" (PME). The PME result is the primary preventive measure that is essential for assessing any work-related problems. Then, we can compare each individual's PME results with their initial Preplacement Eximantion (PPE) and baseline results. Finally, help your employees to take responsibility for their work, build their self-confidence, and enable them to create a stress-free environment to accomplish their goals.

Hanan Ayoub MD, MPH, IMD