Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

Workplace anxiety costs businesses an estimated $40 billion every year in lost productivity, errors, and health care, warn executive coach Gostick and motivational speaker Elton (The Carrot Principle) in this constructive treatise. Employee anxiety, they write, involves “overestimation of workplace threats” and disproportionately affects younger workers: 50% of millennials and 75% of Generation Z report leaving a job for mental health reasons. And things have only gotten worse during the pandemic, they write, as fears of being laid off have become rampant. The first thing leaders can do, the authors suggest, is eliminating stigma by asking if employees are okay, and being prepared to discuss anxiety. They offer a host of tips on dealing with overload, leading in times of high anxiety, shifting a workplace’s culture to one of healthy debate, and avoiding leadership missteps (such as Yahoo’s “stealth layoffs”). There’s not much new here, but the appeal that “having a healthy workplace is a goal we can all feel good about” will ring true to stressed-out workers and leaders alike. The pandemic-specific angle and encouraging advice will be great assets to leaders during this tumultuous time. Agent: James Levine, Levine Greenberg Rostan. (May)