According to Cascade HR’s annual workplace stress report, the UK is suffering from a stress epidemic that’s affecting our performance at work, our happiness, our health, and is keeping us chained to our desks.

With no time for holidays, friendships or relationships, even the most fulfilling job can start to cause a rise in stress levels that will cause problems for companies long-term. A team that is overworked leads to absenteeism, high staff turnover, medical costs and inefficiency in the workplace. It’s a problem that’s costing companies an unimaginable amount of money every year.

With the start of a new year comes a fresh opportunity for managers to turn these statistics around and make sure their employees are more relaxed, happier, and more productive. How do you encourage employees to take annual leave, though? How do you get them out of the office and onto a cruise or into a hotel? Let’s take a look at some of the options.

The carrot, or the stick? 

Large companies like Virgin, Netflix and LinkedIn have been generating a PR storm by offering their employees unlimited paid annual leave, as long as it doesn’t hold up operations. However, this targets neither the problem nor the source of employees not taking leave — which, according to Cascade, is that workers don’t feel like they have enough time and their workload is too large.

Rather than offering unlimited amounts of holiday time, companies should work to ensure that employees take the time that they have. A solution could be introducing incentives of holidays, perhaps partnering with a travel company so they receive deals with the likes of NCL Cruises and Azamara Cruises to give hard-working employees, instead of standard paid leave. That way, employees will have both work motivation and set vacations. In the aforementioned stress report, bonus holidays were mentioned as something that would be popular among employees.

What can managers do to increase productivity?

A major question remains: if we aren’t taking holidays because we feel we have too big a workload, then how do we increase productivity so the workload decreases? At the moment, we’re stuck in a national catch-22. Our productivity is down because we’re stressed and overworked from not taking holidays, and holidays aren’t taken because we have too much stress and work.

By motivating your workforce into improving their productivity and cutting out extraneous steps where you can, you can slowly start reducing the workload, or hire an extra employee to take pressure off your existing ones. Performance management software is a great strategy to get a professional set of eyes on your team and find something you might be too close to them to have missed.

Getting feedback from your team can never be underestimated, either, making sure they know their voice is being heard. After all, who wouldn’t rather be on the deck of an NCL Cruise Ship than at their desk in an office?

Should we put a higher value on our personal lives?

Some governments are taking extreme measures to encourage their workers to create time for their social lives. Japan has become the first country in the world to have government funded dating events for singles, and the UK may not be too far behind. Our birth rates may not be cause for concern, but professionals are now choosing to focus on careers, not relationships. This is leading to a whole new niche of dating agencies for professionals in London.

In Australia, the government has introduced penalty rates for companies making their staff work across holidays. This is something that should, arguably, be more widespread, as not all of us have the option of working for a company with ethical practice when it comes to workloads and holidays.

At the end of the day, taking the time to work out how to increase the happiness of your employees will be its own reward. Millennials are the anxious generation, but working on reducing our stress levels should be a priority for all of us. The increased profits of your company thanks to your motivated staff and high productivity rates will just be a bonus.