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What Stresses Us Out When Working From Home
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen more people working from home than ever before. As businesses look to adapt to the challenging times facing the UK, so many workers have made the transition to having to work from a home office, spare bedroom, dining room table and many other makeshift workstations in order to carry on doing their jobs.
After we carried out our Stress Awareness Study in November 2019, we’ve been investigating what UK workers found the most stressful about working from home, as well as the various ways they’re trying to cope with what (for most) will be a new workplace stress.
Working From Home: What Causes Stress
Cartridge People asked more than 1,500 people what was the most stressful thing about working from home and the answers are illustrated below.
With more than a quarter of Brits struggling to juggle childcare with working from home, it’s obvious that the combination of school closures with a change in how we’re having to work during this challenging time is taking its toll.
That being said, leading the way as a cause of stress is the loss of interaction with co-workers. More than 30% of people in our study cited this as a direct cause of stress. As well as missing out on seeing colleagues, many are missing the added space a communal office environment can bring with almost a quarter of respondents saying they have inefficient space to do their job effectively.
Working from home can lead to distractions and this is proven by the 23% who find that household chores can tear them away from their work.
By now, we’ve all become familiar with video conferencing platforms such as Zoom, but that familiarity with having to chat via webcam can bring its own stresses. More than one in ten believe that this “new” way of attending meetings is stressful. This has heightened the importance of ensuring that employers stay connected to their remote workers.
Alarmingly (for us!), our study has found that one in ten workers are stressed because of problems with their printer!
Coping With Stress When Working From Home
Trying to relieve stress when working from home can be difficult and so we’ve compiled a list of hints and tips to protect your mental wellbeing during lockdown.
Below data obtained from over 1,500 people. (Full dataset available on request)
It’s perhaps unsurprising that a third of UK workers are taking the opportunity to take part in daily exercise in order to reduce stress. Exercising can help for a daily routine and our study has found that over one in seven rely on a strict homeworking routine to avoid feeling stressed. Despite this and the breaks commonly enjoyed in the modern day workplace, only a quarter (27%) of Brits working from home take regular breaks to help their mental wellbeing.
We’ve mentioned the likes of Zoom above and despite the apprehension many may find using this to communicate with work, staying in touch with friends, family and colleagues can help a quarter of us combat stress.
On our blog, we’ve published downloadable activities to help families overcome boredom during lockdown including free NHS thank you colouring in sheets. As well as relieving boredom, these type of activities can help homeworkers cope; 15% telling us this.
Further Comments…
“It might sound obvious, but keeping in regular contact is essential to successful homeworking and ensuring near-normal operations. For some employees, this may be their first experience of working from home, and without open lines of communication, working remotely can create real anxiety and leave employees feeling directionless. It’s important to establish a system of contact, not only between managers and employees but between colleagues, too.
“A sense of achievement is vital to employee engagement and job satisfaction, and being out of office means there are less opportunities for instant feedback. As such, businesses will need to find creative ways of keeping morale high through this period of upheaval. One way to do this is by sharing good news stories, either via email or a shared online platform. Here, you can celebrate your homeworking successes, whether that is about finding novel ways to carry out essential business tasks remotely, receiving great customer feedback, or things you are doing to support employees’ mental health. Encourage submissions from staff to ensure employees’ efforts don’t go unnoticed just because they are working from home, as well as to give everyone a much-needed positivity boost in tough times,” comments Julie Gimblett, HR Manager at Cartridge People.
“We understand that this new of working for so many has the potential to cause problems at a time when there is already huge challenges facing us as individuals and businesses. What we’ve seen is an astounding increase in demand for printer supplies as people look to transition and set up a workstation at home. As a business, we’ve worked tremendously hard to ensure we can meet this demand in a safe way and will continue to do so.
“However, the fact that 11% of UK workers are feeling stressed out by printer problems is a cause for concern. We’ll be working to create important guides over the coming weeks to help printer users and try and alleviate some of that stress. There are plenty of ways to ensure that using a printer at home doesn’t become a cause of frustration, it can actually prove the opposite and the feedback we’ve received for our printable activities is testament to that,” adds John Flanagan, Managing Director at Cartridge People.
Information For Journalists
The dataset from our study is also available on request.
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