How employers and managers can help boost employee resilience
Posted on 24 September 2017
There are a number of things employers can do to help build resilience amongst staff.
Encourage physical wellbeing. Physical health is fundamental to our mental health, and creating a pleasant working environment and promoting healthy behaviour can bring many benefits.
Some ideas:
- Eating healthily - provide fruit for snacking
- Encourage Exercise - walk or bike to work, walk the stairs, provide some exercise equipment
- Quit smoking - offer counselling support
-
Encourage sensible drinking | change a drinking culture
Promote a healthy psychological environment
To make the workplace a pleasant and happy environment:
- Promote an open and trusting management style and atmosphere
- Train managers to consider the mental wellbeing of staff
- Provide job security and try to avoid regular large-scale restructuring or changeMake jobs varied, interesting and manage workloads
- Reward good work
- Offer flexible working arrangements
Sometimes people require specialist support with physical or mental health issues and may need to be referred on for more support.
Provide specialist support to help maintain good physical and mental health, for example from:
- Employee Assistance Scheme
- human resources
- counselling
- occupational health
- physiotherapy
Promote open communication and strong social networks.
People thrive on friendships and good social interaction, and people who have positive relationships in the workplace are more likely to enjoy coming to work and be productive when they get there.
The following can be helpful:
- Encouraging teamwork.
- Sympathetic managers.
- Team days and work social events.
- How employees can help themselves
Employees can also help themselves to be more resilient at work.
Many experts now see common traits among those who display most resilience, including a strong sense of purpose in what they do and a positive but realistic outlook.
Other ways to build resilience include:
- Building and maintaining good friendships and family relationships - social interaction and support is vital to good mental health
- Being positive seeing problems as a potential learning process rather than drains on energy
- Keeping perspective not turning a drama into a crisis - How people react to situations will determine how well they cope emotionally
- Nurturing a positive self-perception - emphasising to ourselves the things we do well and being kind to ourselves
- Taking time to recharge taking regular breaks - leaving work on time and taking holiday
- Practising mindfulness and meditation as a tool for confronting and managing stress
If you are ready to take the first step in building resilience at our workplace click here.
Related Stories
 "Workplace Wellbeing when Working from Home 2")
Create a realistic work pace
You've set up your ergonomic work area, and its time to settle down to get some work done. Because you are not in your usual work surroundings with your colleagues (and no bosses either), your routine is going to be out of whack. No se...
Read More "Your Guide to Workplace Wellbeing while Working from Home")
If this is your first experience of working from home, "Welcome to Work the Couch."
I have been working from home pretty much for over 10 years, and I know that at first you will feel a bit of disorientated freedom. "I can work when, where, how an...
Read More "What was I doing?")
Work Interuptus - how to move to the next focus, and back, without losing the plot
I am a fan of Cal Newport's book, Deep Work - Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, but, I often find it difficult to pick-up where I left off when my Dee...
Read More "Learn the Six Predictors of Resilience")
What is resilience? It's an easy concept to grasp, someone who is resilient can meet any adversity and make their way through it. Simple enough. But, what if there is more than that. What if resilience runs deeper than a simple definition, what if it is more than j...
Read More "How Resilience Is Your Team?")
Using the PR6 resilience model we can now understand how effective teams are at working together to build resilience. The PR6 resilience model was developed from the study of the human mind. Years of research has led us to an understanding of the core elements that mak...
Read More "CliftonStrengths V Extended DISC")
This week, a client asked me,"How Extended DISC compare with the Clifton Strengths Finder" (recently rebranded as CliftonStrengths)?My simple answer is, "they don't compare".They are different.CliftonStrengths, is a stand-alone and specialist strengths-identifying to...
Read More "Workplace Assessments - Prep your Particiants for Optimal Outcomes")
When I see slow workplace assessment questionnaire completion, I wonder whether the participants have been prepped for optimal results. In my experience, there are four questions that participants want to know the answer to before they feel comfortable undertak...
Read More "Extended DISC to improve employee wellbeing")
Improving employee wellbeing in the workplace is essential in creating a positive working environment. In pursuit of that goal, there are so many methods that experts might implement to conduct employee assessments. Over the years, there is one that has matured and come t...
Read More "How the PERMAH Survey taps into your team vibe")
In the era of lockdowns, social isolation and videoconferencing, it’s more important than ever for managers like you to take care of your employees. Of course, employee wellbeing has been a central theme in management theory for decades. However, now its impacts on ...
Read More "Tested, modern tools to boost employee wellbeing")
Cultivating a positive organisational culture among your employees is a task that some business leaders leave entirely to their HR teams. But, despite so many team-building activities and corporate care events, these workforces still complain of negative working environ...
Read More
