Supervisor's Survival Kit: Your First Step into Management, Ninth Edition

CHANGE AS A SOURCE OF STRESS

Employee stress comes from many sources: work overload, role conflicts, over-supervision, ambiguity, insecurity, and change. Although you want to protect your employees from such pressures, you cannot provide a 100 percent stress-free work environment. In fact, mild positive stress (eustress) stimulates greater productivity. Some work environments such as the media, advertising, and political activity have built-in eustress. The way you handle change in your department, however, can eliminate a great deal of harmful stress (distress) that might injure employees and eat away at productivity standards.

To convert dragons into caterpillars, you should portray changes as opportunities for growth instead of problems to ...