4 Ways Internal Communications Can Alleviate Workplace Stress

This Stress Awareness Month, Caitlin Kirwan considers the steps internal communicators can take to reduce workplace stress and support engagement.

Stress Awareness Month is observed every April to raise awareness of the negative impacts of stress and increase knowledge of how to manage it. The Stress Management Society has named this year’s theme ‘little by little’, emphasizing how even the smallest steps to reduce stress can significantly improve mental health over time.

With that in mind, this blog post explores the things that internal communicators can do to help reduce stress in the workplace.

Spoiler alert – internal comms have more of an influence over workplace stress than you may think!

What causes stress?

Stress is the body’s natural response to danger.

When faced with a threat, our brains set off an internal alarm system that prompts the adrenal glands to release stress hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol, leading to a fight-or-flight response. Our heart beats faster, our blood pressure goes up, and glucose floods into our bloodstream… giving us a burst of energy.

This response is incredibly helpful when we’re being chased through a forest by a bear or sprinting toward the finish line of the parents' race at your kid’s sports day. But it becomes problematic when we’re constantly in a state of fight-or-flight and chronically stressed. Hormone levels aren’t able to return to normal when perceived stressors are always present, which can lead to a range of concerning health problems including anxiety, depression, heart disease, digestive conditions, and headaches.  

So what’s causing our bodies to react in this way?

BetterHelp, the world’s largest therapy service, lists work as one of the most common causes of stress for adults in the US. And across the pond, work is reported as the top cause of stress in the UK with 875,000 workers in Great Britain suffering from work-related stress, depression, or anxiety over the last two years.

There are lots of different factors that contribute to stress at work, including:

• Workload
• Physical working conditions 
• Changes at work
• A lack of information 
• Poor manager relationship
• Role uncertainty 
• A lack of control 
• Co-worker relationships
• Work-life balance

The Health & Safety Executive groups these stressors into six areas – demands, control, support, relationships, role, and change.

The impact of stress in the workplace

Too much stress places immense demands on employees’ physical and mental health, negatively impacting things like performance, productivity, attendance, and relationships with colleagues.

Stress is a significant cause of long-term absence, and can result in a rise in workplace accidents, poor customer service, and low morale. On top of that, stressed employees tend to be less engaged and are often well on their way to total burnout.

We need to take action.

How can internal communications help alleviate workplace stress?

It’s important to acknowledge that there are lots of work-related stressors that sit outside of the responsibilities of the internal comms function. For example, role design, leader expectations, planned restructures, and career development all influence the levels of stress our employees are placed under.

However, there are lots of things that are within our control. And while reducing stress in the workplace might feel like an impossible task, the cumulative effects of small actions can be profound.

Doing these four things will help to alleviate stress in your workplace.

1. Avoid content overwhelm

Managing a heavy workload while maintaining work-life balance is a key cause of stress for lots of employees. But a survey from Gartner found that 27% of employees feel overloaded by information, and 38% believe they receive an “excessive” amount of internal communications.

The Information Overload Research Group explains that content overwhelm occurs when the information being circulated exceeds the processing abilities of the individual within the time they have available. It’s usually the result of a combination of three factors – too much information, not enough time, and poor quality of information.

And despite the constant content that employees are expected to consume across a variety of different channels, 47% still struggle to find the information they need for their jobs.

Avoid content overwhelm and simplify your communications by…

• Moving to an all-in-one platform that integrates with the other tools in your HR tech stack
• Reducing the volume of communications by filtering content
• Taking a ‘newsroom approach’ to group the most important messaging and avoid duplication

2. Support leadership communications

Leaders have the biggest impact on organizational culture and the biggest influence over an employee’s day-to-day experience of work. The way they communicate with their team members can make a significant difference to workplace stress.

As internal communicators, it’s our role to support and enable leadership messaging. Providing tools, training, and templates will help ensure consistent and reliable messaging across all leaders.

Give leaders the training and tools to curate, disseminate, and cascade information to their teams in a relevant and impactful way

– Kane Lillywhite, Strategic Communications Director at Bunch Group

This includes everything from supporting open and honest C-Suite communications via CEO updates and All Hands to providing team leaders with a weekly or monthly briefing document for their team meetings.

3. Proactively enable collaboration

Effective collaboration increases employee engagement, which leads to lower workplace stress. So taking steps to proactively enable collaboration across the workplace is a great way to both reduce stress and increase engagement.

Research shows that 75% of employees rate teamwork and collaboration as important to their roles, and 86% say a lack of communication is the top reason for workplace failures.  

Internal communicators have the power to encourage collaboration by providing employees with digital tools that enable them to work together more effectively. When combined with a culture of innovation, having access to collaboration tools leads to employees who are 34% happier than those without.

Using a modern employee experience platform like Workvivo pulls your workforce into one digital workspace, regardless of their physical location or working pattern. Features like community spaces enable team members to connect and collaborate on common interests.

4. Focus on purpose and strategy

2,300 internal communication and employee experience professionals from across the world contributed to Gallagher’s 2024 State of the Sector Report. The report revealed that the top priority for 63% of respondents was to engage teams on purpose, strategy, and values.

Showing employees how their daily work contributes to the ‘bigger picture’ – the organization’s strategy – helps to increase engagement and alleviate stress. The aim is to communicate in a way that bridges the gap between your company’s high-level purpose and employees’ daily experience of work.

Build a strong strategic narrative through leader messaging, ensure consistency across your internal channels, and utilize internal events to build connection with the organization’s purpose and strategy.