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Reducing stress can actually help you prevent premature hair loss. Stress has been known to be one of the major causes of rapid hair loss among both men and women. When a person undergoes stress, his or her body systems all go out of whack and there can be some abnormal changes in the production of hormones which can then affect the healthy growth of hair. However, the effects of stress on hair growth can be reversed by doing some activities that can help reduce stress.

Consider the following easy stress management techniques in order to stop hair loss due to stress factors:

Deep Breathing

This is a simple exercise that you can do any time of the day, anywhere. Just take a deep breath, hold for a count of 3-5 and then exhale. Repeat the exercise several times until you feel more relaxed.

Positive Self Talk

Whenever you feel like there are too many things happening at the same time and you are having a hard time handling the events of the day, do some positive self talk. Tell yourself that you are capable of handling the challenges and that you will survive whatever difficulties you are having at the moment. Repeat this mantra many times during the day and you will feel more relaxed and confident that things will be better.

Meditation

Meditation has long been recognized as an effective way to handle stress. Find yourself a quiet place either inside your home or office or even outdoors. You could listen to some audio tapes that are available online that can help you calm your thoughts. Meditation requires deep concentration, that’s why people who go through deep meditation usually utter a monotonous single syllable that can induce their minds to focus. It can calm the nerves, and relax the body.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation Techniques

This is a technique that you can use to relax the different muscle groups. You can contract one set of muscles, hold them in one position for the longest time you could hold them and then relax. Do the same with other muscle groups of the body. You can then feel the tension being released slowly.

Stress is a part of everyday life, but we do not have to fall victim to it all the time. Try any of the above stress management techniques and you will not only be preventing hair loss, but you will also achieve a healthier mind and body.

Technology and business pressures have led to more and more managers needing to lead teams that work off site, in a different state, or are constantly in the field. Though a manager can no longer simply walk down the hall to talk to team members, the employee’s need for management is no less real. In fact, good management is even more important in remote environments than in traditional cubicles, conference rooms, and break rooms.

A distributed workforce requires different management techniques and skills to keep motivated, productive, on track, and trained. Although many management techniques and skills parallel those used in managing a centrally based workforce, there are 6 key additional techniques a manager needs to be successful in the remote environment.

1) Better communication

Often managers assume that they will have less communication with their employees when they are remote, but in fact, the reverse is true. Managers of a distributed workforce need more communication with their employees located off site.

Employees who work off-site can feel isolated, and they can have trouble adopting company standards and procedures. They can have higher turn-over, and even develop into loan wolfs that are unwilling to work in teams.

Increased communication counteracts this tendency, and helps each employee cohere with the rest of the company. Whether it comes by e-mail, text message, phone, fax, or a tin can and string, communication is essential. Remote managers need to make sure they are accessible to their employees by multiple avenues.

2) Establishing respect

Many remote managers make the mistake of trying to establish their credibility through demands and force- a type of “because I said so” approach. The managers fear their employees aren’t on the job, and this translates into overbearing micromanaging.

But when a manager has the employees’ respect and respects his/her employees in return, everyone benefits and the forcefulness of tone can be lessened.

Respect is created when managers give reasons and explanations for their actions, and the perspectives of the employees are valued. This doesn’t mean a manager needs to evoke consensus, but working to make sure everyone is on board or understands the reasoning behind a change will save time in the long run.

3) Building a team culture

Employees in a distributed workforce might not even have a desk in the main office, so it is no surprise that they may have trouble feeling like a part of a company or a team. Ironically, this feeling of inclusion is highly important to the success of company initiatives and overall motivation and morale.

Remote managers need to focus consciously on building a team community and culture for their employees. Managers can do this by fostering intra-team communication, creating partnerships amongst remote employees for projects, and by forming virtual water coolers and opportunities for small talk, re-living past successes, humor and experiences.

4) Creating accountability through self-monitoring

The hardest conundrum for most remote managers is how to ensure that the job is getting done without micro-managing. Many managers can overcompensate for the inherent disconnect of the remote environment by trying to control every aspect of their employee’s day.

This is, of course, counterproductive because it trains employees to be dependent on ever present management, when a remote employee actually needs the exact opposite skill. Remote employees need to be able to work independently, and managers need to train them along this end.

The key to growing an employee to work effectively in a remote environment is to help them be self motivated by providing clearly outlined goals, making them responsible for results, and generating individual accountability plans with a self-monitoring system.

5) Training

The speed at which a remote employee develops is more important than the speed of a traditional employee because cost of development is so much higher. Underperforming employees and miss hires can slip under the radar much more easily, and this can be very expensive.

On-boarding needs to be thorough and tuned to the employee’s position. Initial training should be conducted with face-to-face mentoring either by the manager or team peers to ensure the employee can work independently as soon as possible.

For all remote employees, on-going mentoring and training is critical to keep them connected to the company, goals and team. It also creates an opportunity to identify performance issues before they have escalated too far. Managers of field teams should think of each employee’s development as a continuous process, and use training as an opportunity for building relationships and evaluating performance.

6) Disciplining and conflicts

Resolving conflict between remote team members can be more difficult and take longer because there is less opportunity to build relationships and find common ground. The avoidance of good, productive conflict is also very tempting for remote teams who don’t have to interact daily.

Managers need to address conflicts as soon as possible, so the problems cannot grow and cause dissention among the team. It is important to address performance issues with individual employees as soon as possible.

Some remote managers try to ignore these issues until a more convenient time (out of sight, out of mind), but this can be devastating to a team’s morale.

Either someone is doing the extra work, or no one is doing it. Both possibilities are unacceptable.

The remote employee management environment doesn’t need to spell painful transitions for employees and corporations. By appreciating the difference in managing remote employees and implementing these unique skills, companies can be successful despite the challenges.

There are many different names for lean manufacturing and lean management, but they all have one thing in common. They try to make the process more efficient manufacturing. That’s it. This is the main goal, to become more effective. Instead of increasing the price of the product to increase profit or by using cheaper, lower quality components, you have to become more efficient.

Lower the production cost of the product by lowering the cost of labor, materials and waste is the means to achieve this goal. You can not only reduce costs by allowing people to go or take shortcuts. It may work short term but eventually it will catch up. You want to lean on the process of your company or organization by taking a careful examination of the processes involved. The process flow is the entire process from beginning to end, but it can be broken down into smaller, self-contained process that can be examined. It is usually something that comes out, it’s obvious to everyone that this is a wasteful process, but this has simply not been fixed.

Now is the time to fix it. Now is the time to make the changes that need to be made and stop wasting time and energy on inefficient processes. But how do you go about identifying and the fixing the problems? It is going to take some time, and it is going to take some work. And remember that you can’t do it on your own. It is going to take some teamwork and it is going to take a team of people working together to get it done. It is not going to be just management in on the solving and implementing. It needs to be a representative group of every department involved, form floor workers to supervisors.

It should also include people from other departments and different levels of competence and experience. There is also a good idea to have someone from the team that has been through a process like this. People with experience can be a very useful tool for a challenge like this.

Not until the next group and team members are collected in case of real change and identification problems. Remember, different opinions and points of view may see things differently and what looked like a big problem in a department can have a simpler solution than previously thought.