What is Resilience and how to Build it in the Workplace?
Have you ever wondered what makes someone successful at work?
In modern workplaces characterized by staff cutbacks, deadlines, rivalry, and organizational change, success relies on an individual’s capacity to cope and even thrive when faced with stress.
What is Resilience?
Resilience refers to one's ability to 'bounce back' when confronted with life's unavoidable adversities. The fascinating aspect of resilience is that it is a learned skill. Like any other skill, resilience can be taught and elevated with practice.
The importance of resilience relies not only on its impact on psychosocial issues like burnout, and stress-buffering but also on physical well-being. Naturally, if employees are in better physical health, they will be better able to perform their jobs and, as a result, will be better able to adapt to hardship!
How can an individual and a team build their resilience in the workplace? Personal and team resilience can be strengthened and enhanced by implementing a number of effective stress-reduction practices.
Building personal Resilience at Work
- Positivity and gratitude Employees who adopt a positive attitude at work, are usually more confident, optimistic, and eager to take on new tasks; therefore, they are better equipped to adjust to hardship while maintaining a sense of control over their work environment.
- Emotional Awareness (self-awareness)Self-awareness is closely related to emotional intelligence. Individuals with a level of self-awareness have a level of insight into the power of their emotions and how to make them work for their growth.
- Balance Achieving a healthy work-life balance can help people establish personal resilience at work. Workers need time to unwind, relax, recover and refocus.
- Purpose Finding significance in one's work and believing that one's work is contributing to a greater cause can help people cope with stress.
- Reflection Individuals who are aware of potential 'triggers' to stress can prepare and gather resources to help them 'bounce back.'
Building Resilient Teams at Work
- Guides and checklists At work, you should expect to face many frequent obstacles and stressors. Checklists and guides are useful methods to equip employees with a resource they may turn to when coping with a challenge to help them improve resilience. The guides can serve as a "go-to" resource for employees.
- Training Training has the advantage of assisting team members in developing a shared understanding, which improves team cohesion and positive team coordination. Besides, it constitutes a proactive approach to any workplace challenge.
- Group debriefings It is beneficial for a workplace to provide 'post-challenge' debriefing to its employees after any difficulty or stressful event. These sessions will inspire participants to reflect on the experience and openly share what they have experienced. Facilitating team discussion about the situation and how people are dealt with has proven to be extremely beneficial for the workplace culture. It improves communication, collaboration, and understanding of everyone’s role in the organization. This process can also include team action planning.
- Workplace Culture Finally, resilience plays a fundamental role in building a team-centered culture. This is the foundation for "team resiliency". A team leader is responsible for creating the ideal environment for his or her team; therefore, offering them the resources to bounce back after a challenge is essential for the team’s success. Given that we spend over one-third of our day at work, being able to recover when confronted with the inevitable challenges that work presents is a very important issue to consider. If you want to learn more about this topic, or if you are looking for a workplace coach to help you and your team build resilience, don’t hesitate to contact us now.