Making Stress Work is the Oh My People pillar focused on stress prevention, burnout prevention and resilience at work. We teach organizations to read stress signals early and use them as information regarding boundaries, energy and workability, on four levels simultaneously: organization, leadership, team and individual.
Nearly one in three employees suffers from work-related stress.
And yet, many organizations only react when it is too late: someone drops out permanently, a team gets stuck, or absenteeism skyrockets.
Making Stress Work means learning what the stress in your organization is telling you, before it is too late. Those who understand what a stress response signals about boundaries, needs and environment can take conscious action. Based on positive psychology and recent neuroscientific insights, we build resilience that does not break under pressure, but bends and bounces back.
Before looking at tools or training, we ask two questions that lay the foundation for any stress policy: who wants to, and who can? The first question concerns mindset, trust and the psychological contract. The second concerns capacity, stability and predictability. Those who want to but cannot, become frustrated. Those who can but do not want to, write policies that remain in a drawer. Many stress policies fail because one of these two questions is skipped.
Stress on four levels
Stress never occurs on just one level. That is why we always work on four levels simultaneously.
Organisation
The question we askHow many people have been off work in recent months? And what is really behind it?
We help you understand the story behind your absence figures and address the structural causes, rather than just the symptoms.
Leadership
The question we askDo you know your own limits and what affects you? What you do not recognise in yourself, you are unlikely to recognise in your team.
Stronger with Stress for leaders, resilience conversations and peer learning: self-leadership as the foundation for leading a team.
Team
The question we askDo your teams have a shared language for talking about pressure, energy and recovery?
Team interventions, agreements around disconnecting from work, and colleagues learning to recognise each other’s warning signs, so the team itself becomes the first line of support.
Individual
The question we askHow many of your people ignore what their body is telling them? That headache, that fatigue: it is not a coincidence.
Stronger with Stress, sleep as a lever, setting boundaries and work-life integration: learning to recognise the signals and make conscious choices based on them.
“Work-related stress is important information for the organization; what are you doing with it?”
Elke Van Hoof, PhD in Psychological Sciences, author, lecturer, and expert
