Resilience is about the ability to cope with the ups and downs and bounce back from downs.
In a workplace culture, this can be applied to an employees’ abilities to manage anything from a challenging workload to frustrating colleagues. It is said that those with greater resilience are better able to mange stress, which is a risk for conditions such as anxiety and depression.
The ability to build resilience is a skill that will serve you well in an increasingly stressful work world. Companies stand to benefit from a more resilient workforce. Building an organisational culture that encourages and supports resilience training just makes good business sense.
5 ways to Increase Resilience in the Workplace:
1. Exercise Mindfulness – Mindfulness is highly useful for managing stress, improving collaboration, and enhancing wellbeing. Integrating mindfulness into core talent processes such as onboarding, manager training, performance conversations and leadership development is crucial.
2. Compartmentalise your cognitive load – be deliberate about compartmentalising different types of work activities such as emailing strategy or brainstorming sessions, and business-as-usual meetings.
3. Take detachment breaks – Mental focus, clarity and energy cycles are typically 90-120 minutes long, so it is useful to step away from our work for even a few minutes to reset energy and attention. This can enable you to grow your capacity for resilience throughout the course of the workday. The long-term payoff is that you can preserve energy and prevent burnout over the course of days, weeks, and months.
4. Develop mental agility – Stopping and labelling emotions has the effect of activating the thinking center of our brains, rather than the emotional centre – a valuable skill in demanding, high-performance workplaces everywhere.
5. Cultivate compassion – Compassion and business effectiveness are not mutually exclusive. Rather, individual, team and organizational success rely on a compassionate work culture.