Resilience is an essential trait that helps drive performance and productivity in the workplace. It can contribute to business success by encouraging employees to face challenges confidently and learn from mistakes. Employers interested in building resilience in the workplace, should first know what resilience is and why it is important.
What is resilience in the workplace?
Resilience in the workplace is the ability to respond to pressure, recover from a challenge, handle adversity, and view the experience of overcoming obstacles as a learning opportunity. Everyone is likely to encounter situations that cause anxiety or stress at work, and being able to cope with this stress is resilience.
At work, resilience can involve solving problems, recovering from mistakes, and facing new challenges. For example, a manager may lose three key employees in week. This means it is essential to advertise, recruit, and train new team members while continuing to perform daily activities. Resilient employees will consider what actions are important, and determine the best ways to complete them as efficiently and calmy as possible.
How to boost resilience in the workplace
Encourage resilience at work – Leaders in the business should demonstrate resilience at work by establishing priorities, confidently facing challenges, and constructively manage stressful situations. Modelling resilience at work can help others understand how to become more resilient and overcome challenges in the workplace.
Learn more about employee needs – Leaders can help build team resilience by knowing what support employees require, while considering the types of projects they find challenging. By finding out what tasks are a struggle for employees, and any potential distractions or obstacles, managers are in a better place to support their team to meet these challenges.
Consider resilience training – Training that focuses on building resilience in the team can be very effective. This training may include tips for handling stress, facing professional challenges, and further information about how to prepare for returning to work after challenging situations or trauma.
Acknowledge failures – Acknowledging failures at work is a valuable way of helping teams recognise and accept mistakes. Accepting mistakes can help build resilience, particularly if employees approach failures as an opportunity to learn. Turning a loss into a positive and using disappointments felt by the team or individual employees to motivate each other can help improve future outcomes.
Why is resilience important in the workplace?
Helps with job satisfaction – Resilience training can provide team members with proven methods of managing stress and anxiety in a safe and healthy way, helping them to feel more satisfied in the job.
Improves employee self-esteem – Resilient employees may have better self-esteem because they understand how to positively and confidently face workplace challenges.
Improves communication – Resilient employees are typically more open to accepting feedback and to working towards moving past conflicts with coworkers. Resilience helps create an environment that encourages open-minded conversations that help avert conflict.
Helps create innovation – Resilient employees tend to be more open to accepting failure as part of the learning process, and be more willing to take risks and share ideas more freely at work.
Challenges are seen as a learning opportunity – Resilient employees regard challenges as learning opportunities to improve their skills, grow as a professional, and reduce the number of mistakes they make on future efforts.
Resilience at work can help employees feel more confident and prepared, creating a healthy work culture and environment. With strong leaders that overcome challenges quickly, and employees that spend less time concerned with challenges and more time focused on outcomes, resilience can have a hugely positive impact in the workplace. Resilience helps individuals and teams navigate challenges, adapt to change, and maintain high performance. If you want to develop resilience in your team by facilitating engaging and results-driven workplace training, get in touch today.
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