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Imagine coming home from work and relaxing while listening to your favorite podcast. Your phone rings with an email from your boss. They want you to renew a presentation. Instead of resting, you spend the evening working and the next day you arrive at work fried.
We’ve all encountered this type of microstress, a term I coined with my co-author, Karen Dillon, in our recent book “The Microstress Effect.” Microstresses are small but stressful moments that add up to harm our health, our work performance, and our personal life. Data suggests that these small negative interactions have up to five times more impact than positive ones.
Highly stressful events activate our brain’s fight-or-flight mode, a response that helps us identify and deal with stress. But microstresses are so mild that our brains don’t always notice them, even though our bodies produce stress hormones like cortisol. Research suggests that microstressors can build up in our bodies. Our brain then realizes that something is wrong, but without always knowing what the cause of our mood is.
Microstress helps explain why employees are so exhausted. As a professor at Babson College who has studied the workplace for decades, I believe every company must address microstress if it wants to reduce burnout and increase productivity. Here are three ways to reduce stress in your organization.
Related: I was experiencing extreme burnout until I practiced these 3 things to come out stronger
Refuse to “try hard”
High-performing people are used to resisting. Get through the next deadline, convince yourself that it will ease up after that, and repeat when another deadline emerges. But no one can work in perpetual sprint without sacrifice. I have spoken to some executives who have managed to accumulate exorbitant wealth at the cost of numerous divorces and severe relationships with their children.
Sticking with it also assumes, incorrectly, that working longer and harder means working better. This is not always true. My research suggests that we spend up to 85% of our time on collaborative work, from check-ins to project meetings to teamwork and more. We can reduce that time and increase production by being more intentional and efficient in how we collaborate.
Reject a culture of hard work in favor of a culture that focuses on working smarter. And recognize that burned-out employees innovate less and are more likely to leave their jobs.
Related: How I broke out of burnout and turned my ambitions into reality
Identify and address microstress through team interventions
Messages from the top signal organizational priorities. But the best place to address microstress is at the team level.
I recently worked with a group of employees to address microstress. Every Monday, employees sent me an email describing a new microstress they wanted to focus on that week. Maybe a colleague was asking for too much help on projects. Maybe their boss kept changing expectations. Perhaps family obligations were creating too much pressure. On Friday they sent me an update on their progress in dealing with that microstressor.
For three weeks I only noticed incremental movements. But in the fourth week, employees began to see how working to control microstressors could have a big impact on their lives. There are three important lessons from these experiments:
First, awareness of microstress can help us resolve it. Employees need examples, a list to look at and say, “Oh, yeah, I know that feeling!” In my work we have used the app “The Microstress Effect”, which catalogs different sources of microstress.
Second, because microstress is made up of dozens of little things, don’t try to fix them all at once. Reducing stress should not cause additional stress. Take microstressors one at a time and start with the simplest one, not the most impactful, to build momentum.
Third, microstress should be addressed at the team level. Teammates should be grouped into groups to generate ideas for actions to reduce microstress, as well as to create accountability by updating each other on their progress. This team structure also recognizes that we can be a source of microstress to others and that the only way we can communicate our stress is in an open and supportive environment.
Related: Improving yourself takes 9.6 minutes of work every day
Be proactive, set new norms and change the culture
Too often it’s easier to absorb microstress than to do something about it. If you’ve ever avoided an uncomfortable conversation, even if the avoidance led to persistent stress, then you know what it’s like. But microstress builds up in ways that are devastating to our well-being, so it’s important to be proactive. A very effective step in combating microstress is to change the culture to avoid stressful moments.
In an exercise I do with companies, we list collaboration tools in one column, from video chats to instant messaging to email. The second column focuses on the positive ways these tools should be used. In the third column we brainstorm the usage rules we would like to improve.
Take emails, for example, one of the most common causes of microstress. Employees often feel inundated with emails that take too long to read and respond to. Moving forward, a team might agree to write emails only in bullet points to prioritize brevity.
Some people might consider this silly. Who has the time to set up the systems for how we email each other? When we are constantly in firefighting mode, we feel too busy to think about changing systems. But not changing these systems and not changing the culture is why we are so busy. A few hours of proactive work now can save hundreds of hours and prevent microstress down the line.
Microstress can harm you, your team, and your company. Stressors may seem small, but that doesn’t make them any less important. So, refuse to resist. Encourage teams to identify and address microstress. And then work together to generate new norms and change the culture.