(https://klowt.io) The first thing I ask my employees during out monthly 1:1’s is “how are you doing?”. Our sessions are 90% revolved around what that person is dealing with, their workload, their home life – are they struggling? If so, why? 80-90% of someone’s output is based on their mindset, so if you don’t know what is happening in your teams’ minds you can’t possibly expect to accurately judge their performance or potential. 

 

Things that we do to help combat stress:

1. Visibility across workloads. We all work from Monday.com which means Managers can see when someone has a heavy workload and look to support them/make sure they stop taking on tasks that might stress them out more. 

 

2. Monthly socials. It sounds fluffy, but bringing the team together once per month for an activity goes a long way for morale and stress reduction. Because of curse, there are months and days when things are a bit crazy, perhaps we’ve bitten off more than we can chew but get everyone together to unwind, eat, laugh. It goes a long way. 

 

3. Stop sending messages out of hours. 

If I have something to say to my team outside of working hours, I schedule emails and slack messages for 9am the following day. This means I can brain dump everything that I want to say whilst it\s still fresh in my mind and my team can enjoy their evening uninterrupted. 

 

4. Acknlowedge that everyone gets stressed.

My team know when I’m under the pump – because I let them know. Which creates space for them to be honest to. The amazing thing about that open and honest culture is that when someone does have a deadline or something that they’re struggling to execute, the rest of the team are on it straight away to help out in any way they can. One of our non-negotiables at Klowt is “there is no such thing as it’s not my job”. And I’m proud that my team take that very seriously. 

 

A bit of stress is good. But constant strain impacts mental health and decreases employee retention.