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PAR for the course: how to help your employees deal with workplace stress
All employers want to improve workplace well-being, but struggle to ease demands on their staff. The best way to manage workplace stress is to give people the tools to help themselves. Here’s how it’s done.
The PAR approach
In the participatory action research (PAR) approach to reducing workplace stress, organizations create committees of employees drawn from a range of roles and levels. It is a data-driven approach in which the committees diagnose issues by gathering and analyzing data, then use the insights to design and implement appropriate interventions.
How it works
PAR works by ensuring that those most impacted by the organization’s problems have an active role in resolving them. This can include redesigning jobs with the explicit goal of reducing stress: by involving employees in developing their own solutions, organizations can foster employees’ ownership of the working structure and acceptance of its limitations. This collaborative approach can also produce better peer support, change management, and well-being outcomes, benefiting individual workers and the business.
How it’s done
PAR initiatives are not necessarily easy to implement, and organizational design can be challenging. Follow these steps to maximize successful outcomes:
- Select members carefully to ensure the committee offers a range of views that represent the whole organization.
- Get buy-in and support from senior leaders to give the committee the agency to implement changes.
- Begin with focused, smaller-scale initiatives (these are more likely to encourage participation and achieve meaningful results).
- Ensure the committee has access to strong data that confirms the nature of the issues it’s addressing and allows it to design the most appropriate responses.
- Ensure that data collection (from workplace surveys, for example) is the first stage of the process and that it continues throughout the initiative, with the committee monitoring impacts and progress to refine aspects of the approach where the data suggests it is required.
- Give the process time; for example, by committing to four PAR sessions over a period of several months, as follows:
- An initial session focused on scoping
- A second session, a month later, to analyze organizational data and the results of a work-demands survey, and plan actions
- A third session, after a further two months, for the committee to assess progress and adjust accordingly
- A fourth and final session to analyze a second work-demand survey, assess what the initiative has achieved, and specify next steps.
Reducing the demands on employees is the most effective way to lower workplace stress.
Key learning
Broader research findings suggest that reducing the demands on employees is the most effective way to lower workplace stress. The PAR approach can help you achieve this through collective problem-solving that involves the staff most affected by heavy workloads.
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