Building employee resilience

In today’s world of work, resilience is a must. But what does resilience mean to organisations and their employees? Resilience is the ability to recover from difficulties, it’s how tough something or someone is, and the ability to spring back into shape. All employees are resilient despite what they may think, feel or get told, it’s just that everyone has a different level of resilience. Organisations work better and are more effective the higher the collective levels of resilience are amongst their employees. There are various ways for organisations to build employee resilience.

Firstly, there is the organisation itself ensuring that it is resilient. This responsibility can include having successful commercial acumen to be able to understand, predict and respond to the changing market place, to having financial strategies to support growth and maintain productivity.

If an organisation has underpinning resilience strategies, then it is much easier for employees to be resilient too.

Imagine a situation where an organisation loses a major client and 40 per cent of their work will be gone. The employees will want to know how the organisation is going to respond. If the organisation hasn’t put strategies in place and responds in an erratic, reactionary way then employee resilience will also be low.

Organisations can help their employees identify how resilient they are.

This can be achieved through effective performance feedback, coaching and encouraging employees to be open to themselves about what they are thinking and how accurately that represents reality.

Employees can also consider how much control they have over the issue at hand and where, they can influence change.

Strategies for managing resilience can be referred to as coping strategies.

I think that it is fair to say that most people demonstrate higher levels of resilience when they have had a good night’s sleep. Therefore, it’s about organisations helping employees have their wellbeing high on their agenda, to look after themselves (eat well, sleep well, exercise, work-life balance etc), facilitating higher the levels of resilience.

Employees who seek to talk about the issues that they are facing in the workplace and to also be available as a source of support for others who are seeking to talk can raise resilience levels.

Organisations are stronger as a whole, and therefore identifying a programme of steps toassist in raising organisational and employee resilience is a must on everyone’s New Year’s resolution list for 2018.