About JB Partners

Our passion for stress management began like most things, forged out of necessity for survival. 35 years ago, from the ages of 16-19, our CEO, Jen, had 3 major life events- 2 physical injuries that brought with them a major change in my teenage lifestyle as well as physical pain and multiple surgeries. Then at 19 Jen's fiancé and high school sweetheart died unexpectedly in her arms. These events forced her to tap into internal traits such as resilience, adapting to change, mindfulness, and grit. Jen began studying these subjects and others during her college years as there were no stress management or comprehensive courses at the time. It took her to receive a double bachelor's, Public Health Admin & Educational Psychology, to fully study the 11 components of what we at JB Partners call SMaRT - Stress Management and Resilience Training.

40% of job turnover is due to stress to replace the employee costs 120-200% of the salary of the position affected. This stat is from a 1998 article called What is the cost of employee turnover? from Flash has been calculated and confirmed over and over.

Most people don't breakdown the comprehensive cost of replacing an employee. And in my 25+ years as a business coach/consultant for both small and large organizations, managers or owners have a tendency to think the grass is greener on the other side and simply fire and hire employees instead of developing them.

So let's break down the process a bit to illustrate where that 120-200% comes from

1. Letting someone go requires documentation, meetings, human resources, and sometimes legal. These all have a significant cost attached to them because we pay those employees to grow the business and when they are taken away from those tasks, we are either stalling or halting any growth.
2. Developing job descriptions and preparations for the incoming hire has costs.
3. Posting a job online to using a head hunter has costs.
4. Let's not forget the costs associated with any tasks not being performed because of the missing or terminated employee.
5. You then have the entire interview process where, again, a business is taking time away from growth, sales, and creativity to focus on the maintenance of the business.
6. Then there's training and scaling up the person fully into their role and until they are at that point the business isn't functioning at optimum speed.

The list goes on and on.

We all have gone through significant changes in lifestyle since COVID has started. There's layoffs, financial hardships, illnesses, deaths, changes to our daily rituals- which has a larger impact on us than people realize- and since we've gone through these experiences our level of fear, anxiety, distrust, and skepticism of others and our future has increased exponentially. What we once saw as stable and foundationally secure we now question.

Now let's take all of that and with a flip of the switch, try to go back to work as "normal." It's unrealistic to expect people to simply drop or change our perspective of the world around us and "act as if nothing happened." There is going to be tension, anxiety, fear, worry, conflict that people bring into the workplace. People will seclude more and avoid unnecessary exposure to others.

And here's what we all need to remember- we are ALL going through it, just maybe not the same way but we all feel the same. If we could intentionally view others through the lens of, "They are afraid," or "They are worried," how would we treat each other. Think about how you treat your family in fearful moments. What do you say, how do you act, in what ways do you provide comfort? That is the universal change we want to have in the workplace right now to provide a healthy recovery for our employees.

Stress is not only the primary reason for employee disengagement but also costs employers 34% of an employee's salary each year. This number is from a Gallup poll where over 73,000 employees were surveyed. The difficulty of assessing the cost of stress isn't the lack of data, but rather the abundance of it. We could keep calculating to find more and more impact on businesses.

Stress in itself isn't a financial cost to businesses. It's the impact stress has on a person's lifestyle that results in at least a 34% cost of their yearly salary. Let's look at it as: absenteeism, health insurance claims, presenteeism, short- and long-term disability, mental illness such as depression and anxiety disorders, turnover, accident rates, grievances/lawsuits, productivity, and fatigue.

These results of stress make up an employee's ability to be productive in their position and within a team. When stress is beyond their stress threshold, and this stress doesn't need to be coming solely from work as stress is an accumulative condition, the workplace suffers significantly.

There are many mental health benefits of returning to the workplace.

1) The social isolation has taken its toll on team synergy. This is something we focus on here at JB Partners and that's how to build team synergy. For businesses, team synergy is essential to their growth because most businesses are either small enough to rely on a certain number of employees to do multiple tasks or are large enough where they work in pods or smaller departments to give that sense of community. Regardless, having physical encounters with teammates builds social bonds we just can't get over video.

2) Working in such a way where your leaders can provide direct support on your total performance is essential for most of our career growth. When our leaders can recognize our work throughout the day, give the little pats on the backs, we gain little bouts of confidence here and there which increases are tolerance for risk, encourages creativity, and triggers our brainstorming. Now some employees might go days without any contact from their leaders and that can bring the total opposite emotions: doubt, thinking small for fear of failure, and linear approaches to projects.

3) Returning to our rituals is essential to daily productivity. How we get up, make the coffee, get dressed, make the bed, our drive into the office, and so on are the automatic rituals that moves us forward throughout the day. We've developed this rituals over decades from when we first started to attend school. Those ritualistic needs are gone for many people and it's easy to become lost in the lack of structure. Returning to work brings that structure back and again the comfort of preparing us to move forward throughout our day.