Time required
Approximately 20 minutes.
Preparation
Choose a stressor from this list, or one common to your workplace, as the discussion topic for this activity. You may be able to cover more than one stressor in this activity.
- Tight deadlines
- Competing demands
- Work-life balance
- Customer/ client demands
- Lack of clarity
- Dealing with change
- Pressure to perform
Instructions
In a team discussion, ask team members to:
- Individually record as many approaches to coping or dealing with this stressor as they can.
- Have small groups of 3 discuss their approaches and group them into their top 5 suggestions. Tell them to appoint one person to report back.
- Take up the top 5 suggestions from each group.
- Ask if anyone has additional ideas.
- Ask individuals to record which approach or coping strategy they’ll try. Tell them they don’t need to share this.
- Record all the ideas and send the final list to all participants.
After some discussion, provide the brief wrap-up below.
Suggested wording
Thank you for your ideas. Hopefully we all have some new strategies to help us reduce workplace stress. When new stressors arise, we can go through this process again to develop solutions for them.
Find more activities like this at Team building activities.