Does Stress affect Work Performance Poster-1-218qmbt
Month: March 2019
Owen Sinderman, Undecided, from Seattle WA
Writing is something I have always had an interesting relationship with. On one hand I love writing in an informal setting regarding topics that I enjoy. In situations like this I can go on and on, the words naturally flowing from my mind to the medium on which I am communicating. On the other hand, writing in a setting such as school, in which my writing is judged and graded causes me to lock up and not be able to get anything down. Over the past several weeks in English 101 I feel as though I have developed more confidence in my work in such a setting through better understanding writing expectations and nuances.
A field in which I feel I have always struggled as a writer is in paragraph structure and flow. They are things that consistently trip me up as I am writing and break my flow as I worry about the very nature of that which I am writing in regards to how well it will be received. Structure of paragraphs I feel is something I will need to continue to work on but in regards to flow I feel as though this class has allowed me to improve greatly through things like Project 1.
It may seem obvious, but as a writer I always feel most at ease writing about things with which I hold experience. It enables my preferred method of writing – that being flow of conscious and lets me not worry too much about whether or not the product is “good enough.” This has not changed much in this class as the subject of my group work was stress, something I am all too familiar with. Something that this class has opened me up to, to a degree is the use of sources. I used to look at sources as just something I had to add to claims I was making in order to back them up but I have gained a new perspective on them as primarily sources of information with which to form opinions and claims. I am personally quite proud of the work I have done this quarter regarding collection and usage of scholarly sources such as journal articles and research findings as someone who has never been too keen on that kind of thing.
In the future I hope to be able to apply the things I have taken from this class, primarily in the fields of paragraph flow/connection and use of/finding of sources to inform papers I write. I am glad to have been able to come into this class with next to no expectations and come out pleasantly surprised with what I was able to get out of the experience.
Over the course of the projects in this class my partner and I have been researching the effects of stress, particularly as it pertains to ability to perform in settings of work. Our webtext seeks to inform the prospective reader of our findings and educate them as to how they can use the information in their lives. It can be found here: https://wp.wwu.edu/mgosresearchweb/
Marcos Gonzalez, Math Major, from Burlington WA
Prior starting English 101 I was not much of a reader, writer or a just an English type of person in any way sorts. I was very much into math in high school and I even hated writing reports for math as well. What really encouraged that was that I am dyslexic, and it makes hard for me to read and so I don’t really like doing something that is hard for me to do and overcome. So, coming into English which was also a required class I wasn’t too happy for it.
However, the first project talking about the literary sponsorship narrative kind of inspired me to write more. For me the project was a way to invited nostalgia into my life. So, it inspired me to write for a bit of time. But it was short lived as I just didn’t have much to go on. I was able to get project 1 and 2 done. But I felt I had to export something that wasn’t me.
Then the start of the research project came to life. I was partnered with Owen Sinderman and it was kind of relaxing as we had worked on Project 2 together, so we knew of our work schedules and didn’t need to figure each other out. I also saw immediate interest in this project as it was an opportunity to go into research math type of writing.
As the project was going on I really got to experience how statistics type majors did their research and how they write their papers. For me it was kind of rough as doing the usual statistics and then doing other things such as sources and updates just became a lot of work to do. But I also discovered the importance of sources as the sources provided a sort of incite into what I was doing. It was like a guideline for what to do and provided more possible things I could do with my research direction. After looking at a four or so sources I began to really like doing research papers for math because it was cool seeing what other professors were capable of and I’m static to show people what I can do. It encourages me to proceed with my major and it also provides a bit of comfort for me because I’m more confident to these research papers because I’m having more experience in them.
I will happy to show our research project to the public as it discusses what effects stress has on work performance. Here is our Web text: https://wp.wwu.edu/mgosresearchweb/
Does Stress affect Work Performance Research update 2
Stress nowadays seem to be an everyday thing. It just to be something that we can cast to the side and just forget about, but we can’t. Stress has many effects in our lives. One place in which stress affects us is our workspace. Stress can affect our how much we focus on our tasks, how well we manage our time and how much work we are able to perform. This I think is most important that stress affects our work performance. Stress may affect the other factors but if it affects work performance then how are you able to get that work back? You don’t. With the other factors you maybe just be able to shrug it off. Many sources address that stress has impacts on our work performance.
The Fox Business says that stress has been called the “Health epidemic of the 21st Century” and has costed businesses over 300 billion dollars per year. Fox Business also claims that from recent surveys 21 percent of people claim that stress was responsible for errors and miss deadlines, 15.5 percent claiming stress was responsible for having trouble getting along with fellow coworkers and many more facts displaying that stress is problem to be addressed. Addressing this Fox Business puts down little ways to reduce your work stress such as participating in an Employee Assistance Program.
Stress has become a major problem in our workplace. So much so that people are trying to provide ways to cope with the stress. The American Psychological Association does this very thing. They go on to provide very common sources of stress such as low salaries, lack of social support, unclear employee expectations etc. They then go on to list ways to address the stress and cope with them. They suggest to keep track of things that stress you to see how you can avoid them or react to them. They also say to establish some boundaries like not looking at emails at certain times of the day, so you can take an honest break from work. They even suggest talking to your manager or your advisor to list what is stressing you out and then to establish a plan to make sure you work efficiently at your workplace.
Work is important to everyone, so it is important that we address the things that negatively affect work. These news article directly address it and show you a bit of ways to react to them. So how will stress affect your work performance?
https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/how-stress-impacts-your-workers-performance
Project 7 – Owen Sinderman
~Prompt 1~
Our research topic was stress and how it interacts with the way that people are able to complete work, as well as workload’s effect on stress. In our research, we surveyed 40 people on this topic and found clear correlations linking high amounts of stress with a high workload, and a significant majority of participants stating an increase in difficulty regarding completion of work while under large amounts of stress. This lines up with research from other sources that we’ve found (all sources listed on poster) creating a definite tie between high amounts of work and difficulty completing work. This information is relevant and important for a variety of groups, including teachers, students, as well as those in charge of employees.
From our results I believe that teachers should try to more actively be conscious of the amount of work that they assign, as especially at Western with the shorter classes in the quarter system lots of assignments can stack up really fast leading to high amounts of stress among students leading to high amounts of difficulty completing work. It ought to be in the best interest of those providing education to make sure that the students are able to participate in learning and drowning them in work ultimately makes everything worse for everyone involved.
This responsibility isn’t only on those responsible for teaching however, as something can be said for students as well. Given our findings students should be wary of taking on too much work, especially those with jobs. Taking too many work-heavy classes can result in difficulty completing work for all classes due to the stress that would come from such an undergoing. Those with jobs need to balance that separate workload as well, as losing time to complete schoolwork can lead to a pileup of things to do which will cause stress and make things even harder.
Speaking of jobs, there’s something to be said for the validity of our findings in a work environment that those in charge of managing employees could serve to understand. Simply, overworked employees will produce lower-quality or slower work than they would given a smaller workload making things more difficult for both parties.
With all this said, everyone has a different amount of work that they would consider to be “too much” before they start getting very stressed so there is no perfect solution. At the end of the day, the most important thing to take from our research is to be fair to yourself and those who you are responsible for regarding workload, as it can snowball out of one’s control fairly easily given enough of it.