07-09-2013, 04:18 PM
Stress Management Training: A Boon to Employee Wellness!
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Introduction
The atmosphere at the workplace has changed due to globalization and technological advancement. This can have a great impact on the lives of the employees. Modern jobs are knowledge-based and demand more from employees, which create many challenges in an employee's life, thus causing stress. The reasons can be: pressure from superiors, target-oriented approach, relationship with colleagues, lack of time for personal life, spouse stress, children stress, and many more. These kinds of stress can create mental and health ailments, which may affect the performance and productivity of the employee.
In this fast and globalized world, helping employees to be healthy and productive is essential for achieving organizational goals. Employees are an asset, so an organization has to take care of them.
Considering various employee wellness programs, stress management is essentially included as part of the training.
Employee Wellness: A Necessity for Organizational Health
Its Meaning
Employee wellness programs are programs meant for maintaining and improving employees' health, which are generally nurturing in nature. These programs are very simple to design and easy to implement.
A Need for Employee's Good Health
Employee wellness programs help modern organizations to improve the organizational culture as well as the mental and physical health of the employees. Most of the HR managers believe that a healthy workforce creates a healthy organization.
The vital concept of an employee wellness program is to align the need of the company with those of the employees in order to implement a more cost effective solution to the health-related issues of the employees. The programs mainly focus on preventing future health problems by healthcare training.
"Employee's perception, emotion, motivation level create a great impact on work life. Developing healthy organization culture with proper Employee Wellness programs is necessary".
The following example highlights the need of employee wellness:
"A study of 23,000 General Motors employees published in May 2004 issue of Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that encouraging obese employees to engage in physical activity as little as once or twice a week reduced healthcare costs by $400 to $500 per year per employee for a total estimate saving of about $790,000 or 1.5% of healthcare costs for the whole group" (Wright et al., 2004).
Though it is difficult for HR managers to mention the return on investment (ROI) of employee wellness programs, it is necessary to keep employees healthyboth mentally and physically. A look at the IT industry shows how most of the workforce is young and have many health problems due to poor eating habits, modern lifestyle, improper mentoring, cross-cultural challenges, etc. Companies like Accenture India, IBM India, HCL Technologies, etc., have well-structured employee wellness programs. HR managers now believe that healthy employees create healthy organizations.
Stress Management as part of Soft Skills can facilitate Employee Wellness
Soft Skills Overview
"Soft skills is a sociological term, which refers to the cluster of personality traits, social graces, ability with language, personal habits, friendliness, and optimism that identify people to varying degrees. Soft skills complement hard skills, which are the technical requirements of a job".
Soft skills are personal traits that enhance an individual's interaction, communication skills and job performance. These skills are very necessary for career enhancement of an individual.
Soft skills can help employee wellness in terms of:
Personal Traits
• Self management;
• Self awareness;
• Integrity and honesty;
• Problem-solving ability;
• Time management; and
• Stress management.
Interpersonal Qualities
• Sociability;
• Team spirit;
• Customer service;
• Mentoring;
• Leadership;
• Negotiation skills;
• Working in culturally diversified environment; and
• Motivation.
Advantages of Soft Skills
The current jobs are knowledge-based, where an individual has to interact with many others in the organization. Demanding work culture, cut throat competition and team-based jobs urge for soft skills.
The advantages of soft skills are many, some of which are mentioned below:
• Effective communication skills and interpersonal skills lead to a successful professional life;
• Soft skills help create an excellent first impression and lead to success in interviews;
• Soft skills facilitate better job satisfaction and provide motivation;
• Soft skills improve one's time and stress management skills; and
• Soft skills help to lead a happy personal life.
Conclusion
Many modern organizations have realized the importance of stress management training to their employees as part of the wellness program, for increased productivity. Good mental health leads to good physical health. Healthy employees leads to a healthy organization. Stress management in employees encourages healthy lifestyle.