Effectiveness of Guided Imagery Technique on Stress Management among South Indian Coastal Employees Working in a Selected Call Center

Abstract

Job stress is more strongly associated with health complaints than financial or family problems1 The dynamics of technology and innovation has now developed talented workforce on employees of call centre Industry. Irregular sleeping, working hours, time pressure, high call volume and low job security are the main stressors found among call centre employees for which they need stress management techniques. Hence as a nurse investigator made an attempt to assess the major deal of Job stress management especially guided imagery technique among call centre employees and help to relieve their work stress. A substantial body of research has uniformly found that over all pretest mean score (67.51±10.2) which was 4.38% whereas in the post test the mean score (21.83±3.72) which is 27.28% of the total score with an overall difference of 57.1% reveals that reduction in level of stress. Percentage distribution of call center employees according to their stress level depicts that during pretest majority of them 84% had severe stress, 13% had moderate stress and 3% had mild stress and no one was coping with stress but after implementation of Guided imagery technique during post-test majority of them 76.67% were coping with stress and remaining 23.33% of them had mild stress. A paired 't' test was performed to analyze the difference in stress scores before and after the test and showed that a highly significant difference (t value of 30.51) was found at the 0.001 significance level. Guided Imagery was therefore found to be effective in reducing the stress levels of call center workers of the South Indian coast.