How to Better Engage Your Stressed Employees

Your employees have enough tasks on their plates. They’re managing personnel, serving customers and working hard to satisfy you, their employer.

But are they spending enough time thinking about their stress levels and how to improve their overall wellbeing?

Probably not.

Why is their stress your problem? Because stressed employees report lower job satisfaction, less job stability and less engagement with their employer than their non-stressed coworkers, according to new research from Colonial Life. Here’s a quick summary of the research:

• Job satisfaction: 21% of employees who describe their daily lives as “high stress” report no satisfaction in their jobs. Meanwhile, only 6% of employees with “no,” “some” or “moderate” stress report no job satisfaction.

• Job stability: 13% of highly stressed employees say they plan to leave their current job in the next six months. That’s twice the level of employees who say they experience lower levels of stress.

• Engagement: When asked how their employer makes them feel, 26% of highly stressed employees say their employer makes them feel “not at all cared about.” That’s, again, twice the rate of employees with lower stress levels.

And that’s not all. Employees who experience high levels of stress in their daily lives are one bad day away from creating an expensive job vacancy.

But there’s good news.

If you pay some extra attention to the emotional wellbeing of your employees, you can enjoy high rates of employee retention. Here’s where a comprehensive look at employee benefits can help.

Support employee wellbeing

Employees have a lot of ideas about how their employers can help alleviate the stress, leading with additional salary and paid time off. Other top requests are additional retirement contributions, more flexible work schedules, additional medical coverage, more flexible work locations and wellness programs and discounts.

Some of these can be costly and time-consuming to implement for your businesses. But not all of them have to be. There are a variety of ways that employers can help their workers manage their emotional wellbeing and mental health.

It all starts by making wellness a priority in the workplace. Your managers could already be aware of employees that are financially struggling or have gotten feedback about employees not understanding their benefits. If that’s the case, there should be a shift in focus to ensure their employees are aware of the resources their employer offers they need to be emotionally, physically and financially well.

Next, you should consider what educational resources you have. To set employees up for success, there must be communication to help bridge the gap between their wellness needs and client expectations.

As the employer, you can provide an assessment of the current benefits offerings. With the help of a trained benefits counselor, you can help them identify any gaps in current coverage. You can support them by providing personalized benefits options that can support employees’ wellness while adding little to no cost to the plan. This is where many voluntary benefits, paid for directly by employees, can be helpful.

Communication equals engagement

You can ensure you’re using effective communications that engage employees in all the resources you have to offer. Nothing works well if employees don’t know about it.

That point is made perfectly clear when you look again at Colonial Life’s research and consider the impact of employees who understand their benefits:

• Job satisfaction: 45% of employees who say they understand their benefits very well report high job satisfaction. Meanwhile, just 6% of employees who understand their benefits report no job satisfaction.

• Job stability: 31% of highly stressed employees say they understand their benefits plan to stay with their current employer for more than 10 years. That’s four times the level of employees who say they will leave in the next few months.

• Engagement: When asked how their employer makes them feel, 36% of employees who say they understand their benefits feel “highly cared about.” Just 13% of those employees say they don’t feel cared about.

Employees who understand their benefits – whether they are the best money can buy or just good enough – are more engaged at their workplace, more satisfied and more likely to stay.

Step up the communications

With at least four generations (Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z) now occupying the workplace, the time has passed for putting up a simple benefits flyer or mailing a package to every employee’s house and hoping everyone reads and understands it.

Today’s employees require a personalized approach to understanding and enrolling in benefits. Your communications strategy should use a variety of tools, including:

• Printed materials
• Home mailings
• Workplace fliers
• Emails
• Personalized website
• Groups meetings
• 1-to-1 benefits counseling session
• Manager training

While every employer won’t – and shouldn’t – utilize each of these communications strategies, you should ensure employees get the help they need when they need it. Picking one printed solution, one online solution and one in-person solution over the course of the year, for instance, might provide employees the range of vehicles they need to get the information they require. And that should engage and educate workers, and lower your stress level in addition to the stress suffered by your employees.