How to make your work less stressful

Workplace stress is constantly increasing. And it’s negatively impacting our mental health. In light of World Mental Health Day, we decided to dig deeper into the contributors of workplace stress to understand how we can try to make a difference.

We surveyed more than 2,000 people who work as a part of a team in the US. More than 80 percent said their work is somewhat to very stressful. And 50 percent said their stress level at work has increased in the past year.

So what’s behind our increasing work-related stress?

More than half of people said their workload is to blame. But is it that we’ve got more work to do? Or are we just getting pulled in different directions, making it harder and harder to get work done efficiently? Here’s what we found:

1. We rely heavily on email, and we’re getting more of it.

Email is critical — more than half of people said it’s the primary tool they use to get work done. The volume of email we deal with every day is rising: 61 percent say the number of emails they receive is increasing each year. Of the people who reported the highest levels of workplace stress, 86 percent said their email volume has increased over the past year.

2. We’re constantly interrupted.

Each new email, Slack message, Google Chat, or text message we receive is another notification — another interruption from our work. Of the people we surveyed, 37 percent said that each day, they receive more than 10 work-related notifications from chat apps alone. In addition, 34 percent said they’re interrupted by other notifications unrelated to what they’re working on more than 10 times every day.

All the distractions are taking a toll: 66 percent of people say notifications make their job more stressful. More than half say that interruptions at work make them less happy in general.

3. The information we need is all over the place.

More than half of people said email is the tool it would be most difficult to do their job without. But we depend on other tools, too, like document collaboration platforms, customer relationship management tools, internal chat apps, and more.

That means a lot of the information we need, like customer data and context, are not available in a single place. So we’re toggling back and forth between tools and piecing together conversations to get clarity and make decisions.

Start taking back your day

The workload doesn’t seem to be getting any lighter, but what if we can be more efficient with our time and the tools we’re already using? By freeing up more time in our days, we might find some stress relief, too.

Imagine what you could do with an extra 6 hours every week?

With Front, you can make that a reality. We crunched the numbers and found that by using Front, our customers save an average of 6 hours per week for every person on their team.

And we confirmed it with our customers. The Fishbowl team saves $150k in time and software licensing each year. The Shopify team responds to emails in less than 24 hours because Front significantly reduced their internal email volume. Y Combinator’s staff replies to incoming emails 7 times faster than before by collaborating with Front’s @mentions and message templates.

In our brand-new version of Front coming soon, we’ve added even more ways teams can work more productively than ever before:

• Intuitive, lightning-fast design: Built on a new coding framework, Front is even easier and faster to navigate and get work done.

• Collaborate in more ways: Want to chat with your teammates without an email thread? Now you can start an internal conversation directly in Front to keep all your work in one place.

• Powerful automations: Front’s new-and-improved rules engine enables more customization to put your inbox on autopilot, so you can focus on what matters.

Teams everywhere are already saving time every week with Front. Do you think you’d be less stressed if you got 6 hours back in your work week? Try the new version of Front to find out.

Research methodology: This survey was conducted on Front’s behalf by Market Cube from August 6 - 14, 2018. Respondents were 2,000 adults in the US that have a work email address and work with one or more colleagues on a regular basis.