Stand By Your Employees In Times Of Crisis

When a member of staff starts to crack it is in the boss’ interest to lend a hand, says If we can, you can member Maureen Lindberg, director of Newcastle human resources consultancy PPM.

Businesses may have a better chance of surviving the economic downturn if they can identify when their employees are heading for a crisis.

A recent study by Coventry University found that 62% of people had a heavier workload than this time last year and nearly a third felt they were in less control of their jobs.

The world that we are in now means companies are demanding more for less from their staff. If they are making redundancies, they want the people who are left to do more work than they had previously.

Increasingly workers are heading for a breakdown or going on the sick due to stress, increased targets to meet, wage cuts and so on.

If businesses don’t identify this and deal with it promptly and effectively then they could be left with little or no business productivity and profitability.

If bosses see their staff becoming paralysed by stress or otherwise struggling they have to remember it is up to them, as line managers, to do something about it.

Many managers dislike or even fear such conversations, but there is no avoiding them sometimes and it is not a good idea to put it off as things will only get worse.

Managers can tend to shy away from difficult emotional issues, seeing it as a personal issue or feeling they don’t want to intrude but it is their responsibility - employers have a duty of care to find out what is wrong and try to help.

Usually the job of the employer is much more straight forward than they realise. In most cases it is a simple matter of behaving with humanity, seeing what you can do to help and assisting the individual with professional support such as delegating work elsewhere or investing in further training or coaching.

Employers should look out for the following warning signs to spot if an employer is heading for a crisis:

Physical: Weight gain or weight loss, increased susceptibility to colds and therefore sickness periods.

Emotional: Mood swings, tearfulness or aggressive outbursts. · Cognitive: Forgetfulness, loss of concentration or making continual mistakes.

Behavioural: Reduced eye contact and decreased social interaction. If businesses fail to notice the above then they can result in increased sickness, reduced productivity and stressed and frightened staff who will struggle to be innovative and come up with new ideas.

As of April 2009 the current law on workplace grievance procedures was replaced with an ACAS code of practice. This means that if an employee was to complain about levels of stress in the workplace then they no longer have to go through a formal grievance procedure.

The new ACAS system recommends employers to use a mediator who has not been involved in the issue to try to resolve the dispute.

PPM is one of the few organisations who have formal qualifications to deal with this kind of mediation.

The benefit of dealing with grievances earlier through mediation is that it can prevent relationship breakdown, increased sickness levels and so on and this is particularly helpful if the employee is already on the verge of a breakdown or walking out the door.

Also by using independent mediators, it shows that the employer is serious and un-biased and is willing to resolve the dispute without awkward long term reasoning.