A resilient workforce is a workforce that is motivated, capable of dealing with change, and less susceptible to burnout. Employees with a focus on resilience and wellbeing in the workplace are generally healthier overall and create a positive work culture.
Why is resilience so important in the workplace?
Resilience to stresses in life can improve our overall mental health and wellbeing. In a work environment, happier employees create a wealth of benefits to the organisation including less absenteeism and improved performance. Other benefits of a resilient work force include:
- Better teamwork and relationships: resilience can prevent negative emotions and thoughts from clouding judgement, allowing us to deal with issues logically. Resilient people focus on solving the problem rather than finding blame, preventing friction amongst colleagues.
- Better communication: those with good resilience often have more confidence. They are more likely to actively speak up and contribute to a team. This is ideal in an organisation for exploring new ideas and encouraging creativity.
- More competitive business: employees who work well together and can deal with changes are more able to withstand difficult times. Resilient employees are also more likely to stick around during and after changes.
- Less staff turnover
- Less absence
- Overall happier, more engaged workforce
Can it be measured?
So how do we know how resilient our teams and workforce are? Wraw, or workplace resilience and wellbeing, is a psychometric tool and survey to measure resilience and its impact on wellbeing in the workplace. The questionnaire can be taken to provide personalised reports with data on the resilience and wellbeing for leaders, teams and the whole organisation.
Having this data allows individuals and management to understand the level of resilience within the workplace and how it can be improved.
How do we improve it?
Building resilience within the workforce should be a top priority in your company’s objectives. It is a skill that can be worked on and improved within all of us as individuals and on a team level.
It is possible to increase resilience by practicing skills such as:
- Build a support network in the workplace: sharing work stresses and having a reliable network around you improves wellbeing. This could be a HR department, union representatives, or employee assistance schemes. A supportive work culture will increase employee confidence.
- Reframe thoughts: resilient people can look at negative situations with a pragmatic view, focusing on small ways to tackle problems and making changes that will help. Instead of allowing problems to way them down or finding blame.
- Focus on what can be controlled: it’s easy to get overwhelmed when things feel out of our control. Resilient people focus on what can be changed instead of focusing on what may be impossible.
Wraw can help to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses within teams, to know what needs to be improved on. A personalised action plan can then be created based on a team’s weak areas and the five pillars of resilience. Using this data, organisations can target investment in wellbeing interventions, such as training, e-learning and coaching, based on their specific needs.
Resilience gives us the ability to cope with the ups and downs and bounce back from challenges. The greater our resilience, the better we are able to manage stress. If you need more advice on resilience or want to implement Wraw into your workplace, get in touch to see how I can help on 07990 712008 or info@almconsultancy.co.uk.