Imagine you're driving home from work, relaxing by listening to your favorite podcast. Your phone rings with an email from your boss. They want you to renovate a slide deck. Instead of resting, you spend the evening working and the next day they go to work fried.

We've all encountered this kind of microstress—a term I coined with my co-author, Karen Dillon, in our latest book “The effect of microstress.” Microstressors are small but stressful moments that add up to harm our health, work performance, and personal lives. Data suggests that these small negative interactions are up to five times more influential than positive ones.

Highly stressful events trigger our brains' fight or flight mode, a response that helps us identify and cope with stress. But micro-stressors are small enough that our brains don't always notice them, even though our bodies produce stress hormones such as cortisol. Research suggests that microstressors can accumulate in our bodies. Our brain then realizes that something is wrong, but without always knowing what is responsible for ours Humor.

Microstress helps explain why employees are the way they are burned. Like one professor at Babson College who has studied the workplace for decades, I believe every company needs to address microstress if it wants to reduce burnout and increase productivity. Here are three ways to reduce stress in your organization.

Connected: I was experiencing extreme burnout until I practiced these 3 things to get stronger

Refuse to “tough it up”

High performers are used to roughing it. Skip the next deadline, convince yourself that it will ease up after that, and repeat when another deadline comes up. But no one can work in a permanent sprint without it sacrifice. I have spoken to several executives who worked their way to excessive wealth at the cost of multiple divorces and broken relationships with their children.

Hardening them also wrongly assumes that working longer and harder means working better. This is not always true. Mine explorative suggests that we spend up to 85% of our time on collaborative work – from check-ins to project meetings to everyone and more. We can shorten that time and increase output by being more intentional and efficient in the way we collaborate.

Reject a culture of toughening it up in favor of one that focuses working smarter. And recognize that burned-out employees innovate less and are more likely to quit.

Connected: How I pulled myself out of burnout and turned my ambitions into reality

Identify and target microstress through team interventions

Messages from the top signal organizational priorities. But the best place to address microstress is at the team level.

I recently worked with a group of employees to address microstress. Every Monday, employees emailed me describing a new micro-stressor they wanted to focus on that week. Maybe a colleague was asking for a lot of help on projects. Perhaps their boss has continued to change expectations. Perhaps family obligations were creating too much pressure. On Fridays, they sent me an update on their progress in dealing with that microstress.

For three weeks, I noticed only upward movement. But by week four, employees began to see how working to control microstressors could have a big impact on their lives. There are three important lessons from these experiments:

First, awareness of microstress can help us resolve it. Employees need examples, a list they can look at and say, “Oh yeah, I know that feeling!” In my work, we used the “Microstress Effect” APPLICATIONwhich catalogs various sources of microstress.

Second, because microstress is made up of dozens of little things, don't struggle solve everything immediately. Reducing stress doesn't have to cause more stress. Take micro-stressors one at a time and start with an easier one—not the most impactful—to build momentum.

Third, microstress must be addressed at the team level. Teammates should pair up in groups to generate ideas for actions to reduce microstress, as well as build accountability by updating each other on their progress. This team structure also recognizes that we can be a source of microstress for others and that the only way we can communicate about our stress is in a supportive and open environment.

Connected: Self-improvement requires 9.6 minutes of work each day

Be proactive, set new norms and change the culture

Too often, it's easier to absorb microstress than to do something about it. If you've ever avoided an uncomfortable conversation—even though the avoidance led to constant stress—then you know what it's like. But microstress accumulates in ways that are destructive to our well-being, so it's important to be proactive. A very effective step in dealing with microstress is to change it culture to avoid stressful moments.

In an exercise I do with companies, we list collaboration tools in a column, from video chat to instant messaging to email. The second column focuses on the positive ways these tools should be used. In the third column, we consider the usage rates we want to improve.

Let's get it EMAIL for example, one of the most common causes of microstress. Employees often feel like they are drowning in emails that take too long to read and respond to. Going forward, a team may agree to write emails only in bullet points to prioritize brevity.

Some people may find this silly. Who has time to set up systems for how we email each other? When we're in constant firefighting mode, we feel too busy to think about fixing systems. But not changing these systems and changing the culture is why we are so busy. A few hours of proactive work now can save hundreds of hours and prevent microstress.

Microstress can hurt you, your team, and your business. Stressors may seem small, but that doesn't make them any less important. So, refuse to toughen it up. Encourage teams to identify and target microstress. And then work together to generate new norms and change the culture.