Untangling Workplace stress through ALM Solutions (Part 1)
Exploring the Nature of Stress
The World Health Organization describes stress, particularly in the workplace, as the reaction individuals might have when faced with work demands and pressures that surpass their knowledge and abilities, challenging their coping mechanisms.
During one of our mental health awareness sessions, we brought this subject, pinpointing key stressors, potential measures, and sharing our personal coping strategies and ideas for fostering a less stressful environment. At the end of the session, my colleague Stefan Thomann, suggested that I outline specific, actionable steps to address stress – a practical guide for those moments of overwhelming pressure. As our expertise lies in designing, implementing, and supporting Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions for SAP Stefan led me to integrate these stress-reduction steps into the ALM cycle, enabling employees to identify and to draw a parallel to our work processes.
This blog series is intended to inform you about stress in the workplace, provide concrete solutions for dealing with feelings of stress and show analogies to SAP Cloud ALM.
Is Stress Entirely Avoidable?
Avoiding stress altogether seems to be an unattainable goal if we want to fully engage with life. For example, just as we as ALM experts set up good monitoring of our SAP systems, there is still an uncertainty that a service will fail. However, it is crucial to be well prepared. Through proactive monitoring and regular maintenance, we can ensure that the systems function reliably even under load and that potential disruptions are minimized. This helps to keep the IT infrastructure robust and responsive to be prepared for all eventualities.
The World Health Organization acknowledges that while stress cannot be entirely avoided, it can be beneficial in moderation: “Workplace pressure is inevitable due to the demands of today’s work environment. Pressure that is deemed acceptable by an individual can keep workers alert, motivated, and capable of working and learning, as long as it is within their resources and personal traits. Yet, when pressure becomes overwhelming or unmanageable, it leads to stress, which can harm both an employee’s health and business performance.” As so often in life, it’s all about the right balance!
This discussion will not go into the origins of stress or its development, but will focus on actionable steps you can use when feeling overwhelmed. Below, the most typical reasons for stress in the Workplace:
- Tight deadlines, High Workload
- Performance pressure (High expectations)
- Promoting workaholism
- Role ambiguity
- Work-life balance
- Job security
- Interpersonal Relationships: Conflicts or poor relationships with colleagues
- Oft organisational changes
- Work environment: too much home office, too much comute
- Lack of support, resources, development opportunities
Self-help steps when feeling stressed.
The development of our self-help steps were done in collaboration with psychologist and psychotherapist Lena Rusti. Initially, we identified six steps designed to provide support for stress management. However, upon further reflection and with a clear goal in mind, we decided to merge these steps into four. This decision was made to align the steps closely with the ALM cycle – Detect, Analyze, Correct, Automate. This alignment is not coincidental but a deliberate effort to create a parallel that resonates with our professional practices, thereby making the stress management process more intuitive and integrated into our daily routines.
Step 1: Recognize
In the context of SAP Cloud ALM, detecting issues is analogous to monitoring the health of SAP business solutions. This initial detection phase can be compared to the personal strategy of pausing to recognize a problem. Just as one might “Pause, Breathe, and Acknowledge” in a personal mindfulness practice, SAP Cloud ALM uses monitoring tools to pause and assess the system’s current state, acting as a ‘transparent wall’ that helps in visualizing the problem space clearly. A problem is detected and a notification is sent. You could also literally imagine a big stop sign or just a notification pointing out an anomaly. Everyone can decide to mark this moment individually.
Deep Breathing is key. Just as the systems collect logs to provide an insight into the system current functioning same the deep breathing allows us to stabilize and look at the our “logs”. As soon as you feel stressed, take a moment to pause. Engage in deep, slow breathing for a few minutes. Inhale deeply through your nose, hold for a few seconds, and exhale slowly through your mouth.
Another useful step is the double inhale suggested by the neuroscientist Andrew Hubermann. He calls it the physiological sigh. “Two deep inhales through the nose (no exhale in between), followed by a full exhale to lungs empty (through the mouth) is the fastest way to reduce autonomic arousal — aka “calm down” & causes activation of neural circuits specifically for calming.”
We obviously breath all the time. Breathing is not only automatic, it is also naturally regulated to follow our needs. Therefore, stress being unconsciuosly percieved as danger, breathing is changing immediately, to suply extra oxygen to our brain and muscles in time of danger (which we actually don’t need). This is why consciously breathing and regulate our oxygen flow is so important in anxiety. So simple and so efficient, changing the gear from automatic to controlled. In other words, switch off the autopilot for a moment….
Identify and Label Emotions. Acknowledge your feelings by naming them (e.g., “I’m feeling overwhelmed”). This helps in managing emotions and serves as a foundation for the next steps.
Don’t miss out on practical insights in Part 2 of this series. In the next blog post, we will continue with the Analyze phase of managing workplace stress through ALM solutions.