Anca: It's a Monday and the sales team has its weekly meeting. Anca feels the meeting room seemingly closing in around her. She feels her palms sweating, a lump in her throat and a knot twisting and grumbling in her stomach. The air conditioning, though on, can't keep up with the waves of heat she feels invading her body. The national sales director is discussing quarterly targets next to her, and every word sounds to her like a hammer on an anvil, loud, metallic, shrill. She knows she made her target this quarter, and last quarter, and the one before that, but despite this, she doesn't feel safe. For a few years now, she feels the target has become harder to hit, not just because of competition, but because of many unforeseen situations that keep popping up again and again. She feels anxiety accompanying her daily, and it doesn't leave her even after she finishes her workday.
Mihai: He's just getting dressed to go into the factory, where he handles workplace safety processes on the bottling lines for carbonated beverages. He's on edge, extremely tired, and feels he can't concentrate. He knows that both business objectives and the health and safety of his colleagues working on the bottling lines, in the warehouse and in the logistics area depend on his level of focus. The more strongly he realizes this, the more he feels overtaken by a growing level of irritation and anxiety. He tries to breathe deeply and calm down, but he doesn't manage to.
These 2 examples can be found faithfully reflected in a Eurofound report. In April 2020, the EU agency for assistance in improving social development policies, conditions and work-related aspects launched a survey tracking how EU citizens assess living conditions and quality of life in the complex context created by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The edition from the end of 2022 also included 10 countries around the EU, and the responses reflect an increasingly complex context in which anxiety and stress become a sad, everyday companion:
- mental wellbeing has not returned to the level that might have been expected, despite the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions.
- 48% of respondents struggle to secure their daily living. Outside the EU, the percentage is even more concerning, at 81%.
- 1/3 consider paying monthly bills to be a very high stress, especially utility bill payments
- 36% of EU citizens still consider access to education and educational programs difficult, while the non-EU percentage is over 70%.
- 62% of EU respondents and 84% of non-EU respondents who are unemployed consider it very difficult to continue their studies or access forms of education.
- 23% of EU citizens and 62% of non-EU citizens have jobs that could be done remotely, yet they are still required to be present at work.
- An imbalance between personal and professional life is felt by respondents in both regions, but this imbalance is felt more strongly by women. 1/3 of EU citizens work during their free time, and more than half of those in non-EU countries.
- Problematically low levels of wellbeing were reported by all respondents, regardless of their region, all mentioning feelings of pessimism, low resilience, widespread fatigue and increased health risks.
Such a reality no longer belongs only to a few people with extremely stressful jobs, but surrounds and affects us all. That's why such a context calls for a different kind of solution. One in which organizations and employees join hands for a better long-term relationship.
The way we manage our energy determines our reaction to stress. The way we manage our energy determines our level of resilience. The way we manage our energy determines our ability to become aware of the factors that cause stress.
Stress management, although it sounds good, is a short-term solution, one that often appears too late. What we need is energy management.
One of the programs we run with the greatest success in organizations of all sizes is "Energy Management", which has 2 major objectives: to increase each participant's level of awareness regarding their "personal stress drivers" and to build the know-how needed to develop resilience, which in turn improves quality of life.
Built on the principle of the 4 energy reservoirs – physical, emotional, mental and spiritual – the program first offers a deep understanding of stress, its stages, and provides methods for identifying the signals that our body and environment give us to see which stage of stress we're in.
Once participants gain clarity about their own stress patterns, the program helps them build a personal plan for reaching the desired level of resilience.
The most impressive result, however, is seen a few months after completion, when all participants report feeling increased energy levels in both their personal and professional lives.
Some of the most appreciated elements throughout the program, which can be implemented both as a single event and as a learning journey, are the ways of accessing the emotional zones of regeneration and performance and the way of relating to spiritual energy.
This refers to the quality of the purpose we assign to our actions and the way in which the life we live is or isn't in tune with this purpose and the values associated with it. In the context of this type of energy, the program itself helps participants find a higher purpose in their own activity and connect to it in order to access levels of energy they weren't aware they had.
Find out more about the Energy Management program here.