How to Approach the New Year: Persevere or Pause?

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has impacted nearly all aspects of our daily lives. For your employees on the frontline, practicing self care during this time means successfully coping with on-the-job stress.

Developing simple methods to help your employees deal with stressors proactively will help strengthen your workforce long-term.

In order to best support your team in 2022, you must first understand when it’s time to ask workers to:

• Persevere. Realistically, the completion of many workplace tasks are still restricted by tight deadlines and contracts. By clearly differentiating high priority jobs from lower priority ones, you can steer clear of overwhelming your employees so the critical work you need gets done on time. 
• Pause. There’s no shame in needing to step back from responsibilities for the sake of protecting mental wellbeing. Advocating for workers to press pause on their routines where possible can help your team avoid job burnout and feeling overworked during this time. Without taking adequate breaks from work, employee productivity, mental well-being and overall work performance are negatively impacted, which can affect your bottom line.

Everyone reacts differently to stressful situations, however dealing with the many challenges in the wake of the pandemic has likely impacted the majority of your workforce. With the right strategies to improve self care and prioritize wellbeing during this time of increased physical distancing, your team can still maintain social connections and care for their mental health while doing their best work.