The Chester Stress clinic has been providing Holistic therapy training to clients in the North West for over ten years. In that time we have trained hundreds of
individuals in therapies such as stress counselling, reflexology, Indian head
massage and Reiki.

Our expertise in Contact Centres / CallCentres dates from the late 1980's when ACD's began to evolve into multi-media customer contact centres.

Since 1989 we have worked with a variety of companies in respect of their contact centre strategies, these companies vary from blue chop organisations such as the Royal Bank of Scotland, and DHL through to medium sized SMEs such as Aga Rayburn right down to small SMEs organisations with 10-15 seat contact centres. No
company is too small or large for us.

Research carried out by the TUC clearly established the negative effects of stress on the performance of individuals within a variety of professions. Stress costs to UK business is estimated at £ 7-9 billion per year in sick pay alone and a recent survey completed by the International Stress Management Association (ISMA) indicated 53% of the UK workforce is suffering from stress.

Why bother to manage stress ?

Within the Contact Centre industry the cost of stress is placed at over £ 1 billion and a recent survey carried out by Unison in Scotland indicated that 75% of Contact Centre staff polled were suffering from stress. 66%of respondents in this survey
indicated health issues had arisen, mainly back,hand and wrist problems. Additional research completed by the Australian Services Union (ASU) directly into stress in Contact Centres showed the 33% of people surveyed stated stress caused them to take time off with an average of five working days per person per year. Symptoms of this stress were generally headaches and eye disorders and almost 40% of
respondents indicated they had suffered some form work place injury as a result of unmanaged stress in the workplace.

How can we help ?

We have designed straining seminars that assist Contact Centre staff understand the cause and effects of stress within their Contact Centre operation. We provide guidelines that can be used to both recognise the symptoms of stress in individuals and develop strategies to combat stress within the workplace.

StressOnHold has been created to assist, through training , all private or public
organisations to diminish the impact of stress on employee performance and to
ensure that the appropriate legal obligations on organisations in respect of the health and wellbeing of its employees are met in full. We present an acceptable
alternative to the traditional methods of managing stress and can ;

• Reduce sickness and absenteeism
  
• Reduce Staff turnover
  
• Improve employee relations
  
• Improve performance
  
• Enhance management's skills
  
• Reduce costly employee tribunal costs