Crisis management in the office: improving your corporate wellness

23 July 2014 by Catherine Holdsworth in Lifestyle

We’ve all heard of the first aider in the office: the one who has been on the training days and sits at their desk with a well-stocked first aid kit ready to dole out plasters (or even administer CPR) when necessary. What you may not be aware of, however, is the gradual appearance of a new office position, the mental health first aider. As you can probably guess these people are responsible for the mental well being of their colleagues. This is not just some posh gimmick from human resources; these people are your colleagues and there to help you.

The pressures of the modern office can be monotonous and mind-numbing but corporate wellness expert Kate Cook, author of The corporate wellness bible offers tips on how to stay sane in the office.

Don’t catastrophise
Dorothy Parker, on hearing a telephone ring, apparently drawled ‘What fresh hell is this?’ We’ve all been there. On really busy days with multiple deadlines, I’ve got to the stage where I’m scared to answer the phone in case it’s someone demanding something else of me. Then I made a conscious decision to stop being such a victim. My attitude became ‘Why fear the worse until it happens?’ Every time a negative thought crosses your brain, cancel it out with a positive one. This takes practice. An easy way to do it is to develop a mantra to suit whatever crisis you’re in today and that you say to yourself mindlessly every time your mind goes into tailspin. Right now, I have to pick the kids up from school in half an hour. I have four weeks to my deadline for this book and I have done approximately half the number of words I promised myself I’d write today. My mantra is ‘I am serenely gliding towards my deadline and everything will get done’ and every time panic hits, I chant this to myself and feel much better.

Master the only question that matters
The ‘best use’ question was taught to me by my first boss and it is invaluable in negotiating your way through any day with dozens of calls on your time. It helps you to prioritise ‘on the run’, sometimes quite ruthlessly. On the morning of manic days decide what you’ve got to achieve that day and if anything interrupts, ask yourself ‘Is this the best use of my time, right now?’ If the answer’s no, take a raincheck and come back to it later. So if a friend calls at work, nine times out of ten, you won’t chat then, you’ll call her back at a more convenient time – unless, of course, she is very upset about something, then talking to her is the best use of your time. Nothing else is more important. By doing this, I don’t let colleagues sidetrack me with complaints about their lack of stationery, unless of course it’s the best use of my time. (No, you’re right, so far stationery has never been the best use of my time, but you get the idea.)

Always underpromise
A lot of stress is of our own making. Thomas Leonard, who founded Coach University, the first professional training centre for life coaches says, ‘One of th biggest mistakes is to tell people what they want to hear, give them what they think they want, without thinking if it’s feasible for you. You overpromise results you can’t deliver without a lot of stress. And of course, if you don’t deliver, not only are you stressed, they are, too.’ Leonard’s advice is to underpromise rather than overpromise. That way your friends are delighted when you turn up at the party you
said you couldn’t make and your boss thinks you’re wonderful when you get the report finished a day early rather than a week late. Make it your rule from now on to be absolutely realistic about how long it’s going to take you to get things done. And until you get expert at this, work out the time you reckon it will take you to complete any task and multiply it by 1.5.

Keep a time log of your working week so you finally get a realistic idea of how long it takes you to complete all your usual activities. This means you stop kidding yourself about how quickly you will perform tasks in an imperfect world – where you’re interrupted frequently – and you’ll reduce your stress levels hugely.

Life events versus daily hassles
It may be that the nature and scale of the situation we are facing is truly threatening, e.g. loss of a loved one, loss of a job, in which case anyone’s ability to cope will be severely challenged. These significant life events demand significant efforts to cope with. Psychiatrists, Holmes and Rahe, developed a ‘ladder’ of life events from the least to the most demanding; the higher up the steps an event is perceived to
be, the greater the coping effort required. The impact of these events is cumulative; the more we have to deal with, the more our coping skills are tested. Sometimes we may not realise the magnitude of the challenge we face, until it becomes obvious our attempts to cope are not up to the challenge. Then we need to get help, as the saying goes ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’, whether that be through social or professional contacts.

Rather than life events, we more often find ourselves dealing with a series of minor issues, which gradually gang up on us and grind us down over a period of time. We tend to forget about these daily hassles, but they too are cumulative and the more we have to deal with, the more our coping skills are tested. Life can keep piling on life events, daily personal and work hassles, so it is not surprising that occasionally
our coping skills are overwhelmed – the balance tips and we feel we are no longer coping. Time to get some assistance and engage our coping skills before our sense of well-being is undermined and damaged!