5 signs your team are stressed and what to do about it

A happy team means a more productive workplace. Unhappy individuals are usually less motivated and can bring down the morale of the whole team. One of the key project management skills is to ensure that your team is working well and in order to work well, they need to be feeling good. If individuals in your team are experiencing a high level of stress then they are unlikely to be feeling happy and achieving optimum performance. It is crucial for you to identify stressed individuals, or indeed a stressed team, and to take action before you begin to experience the knock-on effects of this. One way of finding out if your team are feeling stressed or unhappy is to ask them directly but it can also be useful to look out for signs that your team is stressed. The experts at Parallel Project Training suggest looking for these telltale signals that all is not well at the heart of a team.

1. Do your team socialise well? It is a great sign if your team appears comfortable with each other. The sound of laughter is positive, as is sociable chat. If people eat lunch together or socialize after work then this is a good sign that they feel cohesive as a team and will be more likely to openly share ideas and have meaningful discussions. If your team are not communicating with each other on a personal level then they may be lacking a connection. This is a good sign that the dynamic isn't working, which could be a sign of stress.
2. Happy teams are usually productive teams. Happy, motivated workers who are experiencing a normal and healthy level of stress will achieve more thanks to a feeling of being energized by each other and the workplace. If productivity is falling then this is a sign that the team maybe feeling demotivated or stressed. Be aware that just one or two unhappy individuals in a team can spread discontent throughout the rest of the team. However, beware labelling certain individuals as unproductive or lazy as this inefficiency is often due to a bigger problem in the organisation rather than a personal characteristic.
3. Do you find that you are interviewing new team members on a more regular basis? High turnover rates are an excellent sign that something is going wrong within the team. It can be helpful to analyse who is leaving and if this is particularly a problem in one department. If you can identify why individuals are leaving, you are a step closer to finding the source of the stress or unhappiness.
4. It is well-known that stressed individuals have a greater number of sick days. Stress can manifest in physical symptoms and if your team members are calling in sick on an increasingly regular basis then stress could be the cause.
5. Listen. Listen not only during one-to-one conversations with employees but listen to the chat in the office. You can often pick up on negative emotions by overhearing the chatter in the workplace.