Taming stress like a Zen Master

Job stress has been dubbed the health epidemic of the 21^st century, by the WHO. Stress is a complex concept but could be described as an imbalance between demands, resources and the ability to influence.

Consulting in almost every form will most likely periodically be stressful and being able to prevent and or proactively prepare yourself for episodes of high stress is therefore a top priority at Cupole.

At Cupole we have ‘Vision zero’ for burnout and leave of absence because of work related stress. The vision is a result from an internal study focusing on how we can improve our work environment even more. One of the team members in the project was Jessica Winberg, who started her career at Cupole during the autumn of 2015.

Stress is not a bad thing in itself, positive stress makes us increase our powers of concentration, think more quickly and perform better. It’s when stress is persistent that it becomes dangerous, resulting in symptoms such as sleeping problems, mood swings and indecision.

“Positive stress is needed in our work as consultants, as everyday life often involves difficult tasks having to be completed within a limited period of time,” says Jessica. We have drawn up concrete guidelines for how Cupoleans can work to reduce elements of negative stress and to make sure that employees use their resources in a way that’s as healthy as possible” concludes Jessica.

As an example of activities we involve ourselves in, to reduce the risk of negative stress, is project start up meetings where ways of working together are discussed, a mandatory bi-annual training on how to detect risk behaviour of symptoms and weekly measuring our stress level with short engagement form (our pulse survey).

Handling stress is an important topic, let’s have a more continued dialogue on do’s and don’ts in the near future!?