It is completely natural to feel overwhelmed and stressed as a pharmacy owner or manager. A recent article from the Pharmaceutical Journal highlighted the stress in the pharmacy industry as a result of the pandemic. Often the pressure of the day to day in our daily lives can take control, but it’s important to understand stress, where it comes from, how to manage and resolve it and how to recognise your own personal warning signs. This can lead you to a happier and more fulfilled work life and there are many tools readily available to help you with these.

For pharmacists, the main challenge of the job revolves around stress. Whether it’s not having enough staff to help perform the tasks needed to make it through the day, managing the team to move forward in a unified direction where everyone is on board or having a difficult conversation with a patient who just received a worrisome diagnosis. Stress is at the forefront of your mind and work environment. We have put together three simple steps on how to manage stress as a pharmacy owner/manager.

Step 1: Know where your stress comes from and how to manage it effectively.

The ability to manage stress in the workplace is one of the most important skills pharmacists can possess to successfully lead a team. Pharmacists who can deal with stress will be able to build something extraordinary, whilst also being able to enjoy the process and not stressing over every worry. Being able to pre prepare rotas, organising your workforce and automating leave requests and payment, are all amongst a list of worries you may have. Why not eliminate these worries by downloading our brochure below and checking out some of our product offerings.

Step 2: Relinquish control

You can only manage so much given time and physical constraints. When you put more on your plate than you have room for, you get a full serving of stress. If you learn to delegate to your trusted staff members, then you will be able to sign off on some of those worries in your mind. But remember that when you hand over a task, don’t hover or micromanage. Trying to maintain control after giving up a duty is worse for stress than doing it yourself.

That means making sure your staff members are ready and capable. If you don’t have employees you can trust, train them or hire better. This can be made easy through our bank product where you can increase your bank staff growth and fill rate on the go, using our mobile app. You can also significantly reduce your reliance on external agencies. Our bank product will help you to double your bank pool and save over 100K in agency fees every year. A niche product - but a helpful one!

Step 3: Become cognitively flexible

Being productive is the most important reason that learning to deal with stress will be an asset for your life. If you are fixated on the past, you will have very little room to be mentally present and productive at work. We can all fall prey to thought patterns that stop our ability to focus on what really matters. So why not look to the future and choose to be a pre planner and a strategist! It can sometimes be difficult to keep track of your day to day running in a Pharmacy, however centralised reporting systems would help you to make better informed, data driven decisions. It would also help to improve your financial and operational performance to give you full financial oversight of your business at all times!

Want to learn more about our reporting product? Download the brochure here.