Tag: Accountants

For accountant stress management to be effective over the long haul, the key is to not only learn and use certain stress management tips that we discussed last week but to also learn to live your life and see your world in a way that makes distress less likely. Stress management is a process that includes more than just healthy living tips but honing and applying personal principles to your overall life as well. If you find the main sources of your stress come from current accounting practices that could use an overhaul or adjustment, Beck and Company Certified Public Accountants and Business Advisors are here to help. Please contact us for a consultation about your accounting needs.

Here are some principles that, when practiced consistently, can help you manage your stress and keep your distress at a minimum:

 

• Take responsibility for yourself, your life, your behavior, and your stress.

Consciously or sub-consciously, if you don’t take responsibility, you effectively delegate it to someone or something else. This means you are handing over control of your life and your stress level to someone or something else.

• Identify your principles, values, and goals. Live by them, too.

Decide what’s important to you and what you want out of life, and make your behavior consistent with this. For example, if a strong family life is most important to you yet you repeatedly take on tasks that make it impossible for you to be with your family, you will feel distress. The more your behavior matches your values and principles, the less distress you will experience.

Make sure your principles, values, and goals apply to you and your behavior. If your values are centered on everyone else in your life acting fairly and appropriately, you set yourself up for frustration. People will not always act in accordance with your goals. Make sure your principles, values, and goals are flexible enough to allow you to still be human. If it is important to you to be perfect and never make mistakes, you will live your life in a constant state of distress.

• Learn to practice a measure of acceptance in your life.

Things will not always go the way you want them to. Focus more of your attention where you have influence and less of your attention where you have little or no control.

• Don’t take yourself too seriously all the time.

At least once a day, do something just because you enjoy it no matter how small or ridiculous it may be. Find some humor in your day, and in the process, get a change in perspective.

• Conduct an inventory of yourself and identify your own personal internal stressors.

Identification is half the battle to resolution. Are you a people pleaser? Do you have a hard time saying “no” to people or opportunities? Are you a perfectionist? Does every mistake take another notch out of your self-worth? If you need help dealing with these issues, get it.

Identify your own personal cues that signal when you are distressed. Do you tense up? Do you get headaches? Do you become irritable, angry, or defensive? Do you feel confused? Do you have a more difficult time than usual making decisions? Create strategies to lessen or eliminate these tendencies all together.

• Think outside of yourself, and give back to others.

One of the quickest and easiest ways to put stress in perspective is to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes and realize that your life might not be so bad after all. By serving and giving away time and resources to others, you get fulfillment in the process of fulfilling the needs of others. Decide how you want to give back, and go do it!

Although you won’t always do all of these things right, stay focused on the daily process of stress management and living by your personal principles. Over time, you will begin to notice that the times of distress become fewer and further between. Even though the accountant responsibilities and pressures of your accounting job still exist, you will be able to cope better with them. If it is your accounting practices that are causing you the most stress, contact us here at Beck and Company CPAs so we can assist you with these.

Addressing accountant stress requires a holistic approach to deal with the overarching impacts it has on many facets of life. Last week, we took a look at factors that cause stress in the workplace. Once those are identified, it is important to deal with each stressor individually. Unfortunately, those can be mitigated to some degree but will likely not be solved completely nor will they stay isolated to the workplace alone. Therefore, stress management must also address physical, psychological, social, and environmental factors both now and for the longer term. Beck and Company Certified Public Accountants and Business Advisors personally understand accountant stress and can help you alleviate them through assistance in improving accounting practices. Let us help you address your specific accounting needs.

Here are a variety of tips for holistically managing accountant stress both at the workplace and outside the workplace:

 

1. Have a personal and professional social support network

Developing a good social support network and spending time with friends and family away from work is helpful for managing stress. Work teams need to spend time doing other things like team building every so often to develop some social bonds and not just associate each other with work and its stressors.

 

2. Maintain a healthy diet

This is so much more than simply watching your portions and intake. It also means intentionally not indulging in unhealthy foods thinking they will relieve stress and reducing the intake of things link caffeine, alcohol, and unnecessary over-the-counter medications.

 

3. Exercise regularly

Exercise is a great stress management technique that also has endless health benefits. Non-competitive forms involving mindfulness are especially beneficial. Exercises that are done outside and in nature, such as golf and hiking, are great, too.

 

4. Sleep well and get sufficient sleep

It may be common sense, but getting enough sleep benefits stress levels. You can’t cheat your own biological system and get away with it long term. Although it seems like having more time in your day may be beneficial, less is not more when it comes to sleep.

 

5. Practice deep breathing and use relaxation techniques in moments when stress hits hard

Tense your stomach muscles, shoulders, fists, eyes, jaw, and all the other muscles of your body while holding your breath. Release and relax. Put your hand on your stomach just below your belly button and breathe slowly and deeply so your hand moves out as you breathe in. Breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. Repeat.

 

6. Laugh and play more

Laughter is something we can all afford to engage in more regularly. The most stressful professions often use humor as a healthy coping mechanism. Additionally, a little playfulness even in the workplace will actually boost productivity and help staff stay happy and healthy. By lightening up you will not only live longer but, contrary to fears, get more done.

 

7. Reframe your thinking and attitude

Often just changing the way you think about something will make it less stressful because stress really results from perceived difficulty. You can always change your own viewpoint to a more effective one and find ways to stay positive.

Now that we have addressed many tips to help any accountant holistically deal with accountant stress, we will take a look next week at the personal side of managing stress. We will address personal principles that, when practiced on a daily basis, can help you personally manage your stress and keep your distress at a minimum. If you need more assistance with increasing your accounting practice efficiency or other factors that may be influencing your stress, contact Beck and Company CPAs.

It is a universal problem that comes with the territory. Yes, all accountants experience stress. Hopefully this gives you hope that you are not alone. Although this fact of universal stress is known, the common causes might be less known and a bit more subtle. To manage stress well, it is important to know specifically where it originates from first. Only then can those factors be dealt with effectively because they can be addressed individually. It is much more meaningful and productive to deal with individual stressors instead of simply seeing stress at a collective level and therefore be overwhelmed by it all. Beck and Company Certified Public Accountants and Business Advisors know all about accountant stress that impacts all of us and can assist you with this and with your specific accounting needs that may be one of the factors causing you worry.

What are the factors causing accountant stress in the workplace, and how can they be dealt with?

• Role Ambiguity

This stress is created because an individual does not clearly understand what is expected on the job. It might be worth a conversation to get this sorted out or to ask for a list of responsibilities complete with deadlines and explanations of each.

• Role Conflict

This stress is created because an individual is presented with conflicting demands or an unclear chain of command. Most organizations likely have organizational charts detailing who reports to who and who should be doing what. Ask for this document for clarification purposes or find a time to meet and clarify things with the co-workers who may be requiring opposing responsibilities without even realizing it.

• Overload—Quantitative

This stress is created by the perception of too great a volume of work to accomplish in the allocated time or the job scope and depth. Figure out what your focus should be and prioritize tasks accordingly. Set time frames and parameters for yourself so you don’t get bogged down by menial tasks instead of essential ones.

• Overload—Qualitative

This stress is created by job requirements which exceed the individual’s ability or skill level. Albeit awkward, have a conversation with your boss if you feel some of the expectations put in front of you are not correlated well to your expertise. You likely won’t be able to hand off all of that work to someone else, but you can educate your boss on your skills so future assignments are more aligned to your skills.

• Career Progress

This stress is created by not having enough perceived opportunities to advance or learn new skills and techniques. Just like educating your boss on what skills don’t suit you, also inform him or her about your interests and ways you would like to grow as an accountant.

• Time Pressures

This stress is caused by the perception of unreasonable deadlines and time demands. Although some of this is just the nature of accounting work, see if any work can be shared or if there is a way to spread tasks out more evenly. Consider ways to organize yourself better so deadlines don’t sneak up on you.

• Personnel Tensions

Stress resulting from lack of trust in co-workers or dealing with challenging differences in opinion and/or work style. For more information on this and to help in developing strategies for coping with difficult staff member situations, visit here. The article details how to establish trust in the workplace, tips for communicating with others, recommendations on avoiding the troublemakers, and the importance of verifying rumors.

Take a look back through the list, and do a quick personal assessment of what the top accountant stress factors are for you personally. Take small steps in trying to alleviate what you can. Stay tuned over the next few weeks to discover or refresh yourself on some important stress management tips that go beyond the workplace. In the meantime, if you have realized there is one or more factors from above that you could use some help in addressing or for more assistance with your accounting practices, Beck and Company CPAs can help. Please contact us for a free consultation to find out how we can help you address your accounting needs.