Many employees work in high-pressure environments, whether they’re in high-flying managerial positions or doing a work experience placement. Everyone is faced with deadlines and tasks that have to be completed on time and to the best of their ability and that can mean working extra hours or even doing your own research in your free time to brush up on your skills in preparation to hit the ground running when you start your next campaign.

Studies have shown that the average employee deals with between 30 and 100 campaigns, are interrupted from their tasks seven times every hour and distracted 2.1 hours every single day. They have also shown that four out of ten people working at large companies are going through a period of restructuring, with the company either moving staff into different positions, hiring new staff who have applied through sites like www.jobstoday.co.uk and putting those who have been in positions for a significant period of time on red alert that their own jobs may be affected, creating a highly stressed working environment.

So what, as managers, can you do about it? You want to make sure that you promote a professional working environment whereby you present the best products or services for your customers and clients, but you also want to make sure that staff morale remains high, avoiding the situation where they arrive for work each day feeling like a machine and churning out the same things over and over.

One thing you can do to keep morale high and stress low is to encourage your staff to take the breaks they’re entitled to. This might sound counter-productive, but when you have staff who are sitting in the same chair from the moment they walk in until the moment they walk out, only leaving their desk to go to the toilet, make coffee and to eat their lunch, it can get very hard to produce their finest work. Encourage them to take the time to drink their cup of coffee away from their desk, to go out on their lunch breaks for fresh air and to participate in some kind of activity to forget about work for a few minutes and to refresh their brains.

On that note, adding some kind of breakout area to your workplace, filled with activities and comfortable seating can help staff to relax. It might be that adding a pool or table tennis table can be the solution, getting them on their feet and moving around, essentially switching off their brains for a few minutes – you never know, it might help to spark an idea without them thinking about it.

A final tip is to make sure that people aren’t working more hours than is essential. Many employees, new and established within the firm, are workaholics, working late into the night to meet deadlines. If this is the case, make sure they are rewarded for the hard work they have put in by telling them to take an extended lunch break or to come in late when they’ve worked so hard and for so long for the benefit of the company to prevent them from burning out physically and mentally.