Stress Levels Rising [Credit Union Management]

Strategies to help staff cope.

Its not a big surprise to any of you reading this that there's a lot of stress going on these days in the workplace. Over the past five years, we've seen the levels of perceived employee stress from our credit union clients steadily increase, with the biggest jump taking place between 2010 and 2011.

What's leading to all of this stress? Obviously the economy is a big contributor. In light of the downturn, many credit unions continue to "tighten their belts" with fewer staff bonuses, lower salary raise percentages, fewer new hires, etc.

As such, employees are doing more with less. While most do so graciously, it still leads to a pressure cooker environment for staff. The stress credit union employees face these days may be unavoidable, but strategies to help them deal with it are available. Read on:

Offer an employee assistance program. Roughly 50 percent of all U.S. companies offer EAP services to their employees. In these programs, the organization works with a party (often the health insurance provider) to provide confidential counseling services to its staff.

These are usually offered at minimal costs to the organization, especially if the EAP is offered through the medical insurance provider. Employees (and their families) can seek free counseling through the third party on such issues as family relationships, emotional problems, substance abuse, work relationships and financial concerns.

According to the Department of Labor, companies with EAPs have been shown to reduce absenteeism, reduce medical costs stemming from mental health issues and improve employee retention.

With an EAP, not only does the employee feel better, but the organization reaps real bottom line savings!

Offer stress reduction workshops. This is another great feature of most EAPs: the added benefit of coming to the CU and meeting with staff about coping strategies and other topics that may be of interest to the group.

These are often termed "brown bag lunches" since employees voluntarily participate in these sessions during their lunch breaks. Such topics as time management, financial issues and stress management techniques are usually part of the session offerings. If your credit union chooses not to have an EAP, these workshops can still be provided by internal staff. Perhaps a VP can cover time management and the CFO can tackle budgeting.

Look at creative scheduling. There are many ways credit unions can get involved, in -house, in pro actively addressing employee stress levels.

One way is through developing work/life balance strategies, such as flexible scheduling for those departments that can support it, as well as telecommuting options.

By giving employees more flexibility in their scheduling, they can often better deal with their stressors, thus enabling them to perform better on the job.

Conduct workload analyses. Another in-house solution is conducting workload analyses on different jobs in the credit union to ensure jobs are still manageable and not overwhelming.

Quite often, jobs are not looked at individually to determine how much workload has been added to them over the course of a year or so. This is an especially important task, as employees are finding themselves with more and more responsibilities as other jobs in their departments are eliminated.

Check on management staff. It is under standable that managers perceive higher levels of stress than non-managers. After all, it's the nature of the beast that with more responsibilities come higher levels of stress.

Still, our survey findings have shown that the gap between management and non-management perceptions of stress have widened over the past year.

In response, focusing more on managers and their concerns is becoming even more important.

We often recommend that our clients conduct focus groups with managers to determine the root causes of this stress disparity and create action steps to bring the stress levels more in line.

Also, if an EAP is offered at the credit union, it is worthwhile to continue advertising this benefit with the management team so they will not only pass it on to their staff, but possibly take advantage of the opportunity themselves.

Over the past five years, we've seen the levels of perceived employee stress from our credit union clients steadily increase, with the biggest jump taking place between 2010 and 2011.

Resources

Read more articles by Kerry Liberman by searching for her at cumanagement org/archive.

Kerry Liberman is president of People Perspectives LLC (www.peopleperspectives.corrU a consulting firm that conducts employee opinion surveys and internal service surveys with credit unions. She can be reached at 847.446.5250, or by email [email protected].