Just before Easter I wrote about the importance of fitness: how keeping your team fit, healthy and happy was not only good for them – it was good for your company’s bottom line as well.

And let me hark back to one of the very first Castle blogs: the growing popularity of standing desks. The evidence against sitting becomes more compelling every day: here’s the latest research which I came across over the weekend. No wonder Steve Jobs was famous for his ‘walking meetings.’ Mind you, I’d like to invite some of the disciples of walking meetings – almost all from Southern California – to chat about the latest tech breakthrough as they stroll round Scarborough sea front in January…

Let’s turn to this week’s post – and time to consider the other side of fitness in the office: what’s fast becoming the scourge of the British workplace. Stress.

15.2m working days a year are lost through stress, anxiety and depression. Crucially, the average days lost per case are high at 23.3 days per case. So if one of your team is off with stress, they’re likely to be off for a long time – with all the disruption that entails for your business.

The stress epidemic really took hold in the recent economic downturn. Stories about ‘half the staff doing twice the work for the same pay’ were everywhere. But as the economy has improved, so people have been more prepared to talk about stress and depression – and to seek help for it. A recent YouGov survey found that 56% of people say they find work ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ stressful – while 78% of employees would welcome support from their employer on mental health issues.

So it looks like this is another buck that’s going to stop at your desk. The question is, what can you do? After all, you still have targets to meet and clients to satisfy – and that’s before the inevitable tensions and personality clashes that any office generates.

But if you’re running an SME you simply can’t throw money at the problem. Yes, stress management classes for everyone would be lovely, but we’re living in the real world. So here are five strategies that have worked for me – and which have (hopefully) kept the Castle team on an even keel!

Appreciate people’s work/life balance and embrace flexible working. The days of Monday to Friday 9 to 5 are gone and they’re not coming back. And you’ll never get anyone to perform at 100% if their body is in the office while their mind is at the Nativity Play or Sports Day. We try to be as flexible as possible at Castle – and it absolutely pays dividends.

Choose the right people: one of the great skills of recruitment is putting a team together – so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. You see it in sport and you see it in business: give me a team that gels over a collection of individuals every day of the week. So whether we’re recruiting for ourselves or recommending a candidate to a client, one of the key questions we’ll always ask is ‘will this person fit with the rest of the team?’

Read a book – back to Southern California and of course all offices should have a dedicated play room with the latest video games, exercise equipment and multi-coloured bean bags. Could I suggest a simpler alternative? A quiet space with a few books and magazines. Creating a ‘library’ for the office doesn’t take any more work than asking everyone to bring in a few paperbacks they’ve finished with: and it’ll be interesting to see who brings the well-thumbed copy of 50 Shades…

Meditation: I’m absolutely convinced that one of the biggest uses of our phones will ultimately be in monitoring our health, and I referred to a running/walking app in a previous post. But it’s not all about exercise: a friend of mine is devoted to this meditation app from www.anamaya.co.uk Meditation doesn’t work for everyone, but some of your team may find that it really helps.

Finally – and this is right at the heart of everyone’s work/life balance, respect their privacy. If you want to read about a spectacular management own goal, read this story about an American law firm – a ‘joke’ that will have made a few employees start polishing their CVs. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that staff are becoming more protective of their downtime and a successful employer will respect that. We all want to lie on the beach without thinking of the office – me included!

I hope those ideas help. Yes, we all work in competitive industries and we all have deadlines and targets. But we’re not going to meet them if key members of our teams are suffering from stress, anxiety or depression – and anxiously waiting for a GP appointment.