Employees in especially stressful fields, like construction, often deal with a host of challenges and obstacles daily. Without adequate support from their employers, they risk burnout, physical health complications, and worse.
So what measures can you enact as an employer to better support your stressed employees?
A Look at the Construction Industry
The construction industry has one of the highest rates of suicide in any industry, so it serves as an excellent example of what working in a stressful career can do. In the construction industry, people are often subjected to heavy manual labor. It’s an industry that’s rife with both acute and chronic injuries, and the work is extremely difficult from a physical standpoint. It’s a repetitive, demanding career that many people pursue for decades, far beyond their natural strength and stamina can carry them.
To make matters worse, people in the construction industry often resort to the use of substances to ease their pain, increase their energy levels, and relieve their heightened stress. If left unchecked, these substance use problems can snowball out of control, not only making matters worse for the individual using those substances but also exposing everyone on their team to increased risks.
The construction industry is an exceptionally stressful sector with unique stressors, but almost any stressful industry can follow similar strategies to better support their employees.
Understand the Challenges
Your first responsibility in supporting stressed employees is understanding the challenges of the work. Proactively identifying the biggest sources of stress in the career, expressing empathy for the employees dealing with it, and mitigating those stressors whenever possible can go a long way in making employees feel supported.
This approach serves many purposes, such as filtering out prospective candidates who aren’t prepared for those stressful challenges, making employees feel heard and valued, and setting yourself up for environmental changes that can reduce the average stress load.
Distribute Workloads Appropriately
One critical strategy for mitigating stress is distributing workloads appropriately. Depending on the circumstances, that could mean making sure that the work is evenly divided, or making sure to rotate responsibilities so no individual is exposed to too much stress or risk at any given time. For example, in the construction industry, you can make sure people are on different duties so they aren’t as likely to experience repetitive strain injuries.
You may also want to keep individual strengths and weaknesses in mind here. For example, younger workers can typically tolerate more strenuous and repetitive activities than older workers.
Set Reasonable Goals
Reasonable, achievable goals are indispensable in making sure your employees never experience too much stress. In many cases, employees feel extra stress and are more likely to suffer burnout simply because they feel like too much is expected of them, or because they’ve been saddled with an impossible goal. If you keep your demands reasonable, and if employees have an adequate amount of challenge without being overwhelmed, suddenly, the job becomes much less stressful.
Create Collaborative Teams
The challenges of a hard job become much easier to handle when you have a good team of people surrounding you. Accordingly, take responsibility for creating and facilitating collaborative, mutually supportive teams.
Encourage Breaks and Time Off
You should also encourage breaks and regular time off so the stress of the career can dissipate, at least temporarily. Frequent breaks throughout the day can eliminate some of the repetitiveness and strenuousness of the work. Occasional vacations can help employees reconnect with the things that matter most to them and “reset” before coming back to the job.
Offer or Raise Awareness of Mental Health Support
There are countless options for mental health support if you know where to look. Make sure your employees know that these resources exist, and consider offering to connect your employees to those resources if you can. For example, you can make your employees aware of free support groups that are practicing in your area.
Create Open Communicative Environments
It’s also important to create environments where your employees feel comfortable openly communicating. This way, if they have grievances or concerns, they can bring them to your attention, and you can take action before it’s too late.
Gather and Pay Attention to Feedback
Along similar lines, be sure to gather and pay attention to employee feedback. Conduct anonymous surveys and in-person interviews regularly, then study the results with attention. The more you learn about your employees’ attitudes and experiences, the better you’ll be able to shape their workplace environment
Stressful careers aren’t easy to manage, but they become much easier with the help of a caring, responsible employer. As an employer in a stressful industry, you owe it to your employees (and your shareholders) to better support your workers.
