Building resilient workers

By Elle Balchin, Rehabilitation Consultant – OT

When I show up to work places to talk about resilience, I will admit I catch a few eye rolls.

Certainly workplaces and organisations have started scheduling in ‘resilience training’ for staff because they recognise that having resilient workers is valuable for the success of a business. However, sometimes I wonder if the true meaning of “building resilient workers” is lost.

The first thing I do when I start to talk about resilience (after the deep sighs have subsided) is to ask staff and managers to help me define what resilience means in a way that’s directly applicable to the workplace. I’m often met with some variation of the following:

“Resilience is being able to handle whatever life throws at you”

“Resilience is the ability to cope no matter how hard things get”

“Resilient workers are the ones that can deal with the day to day stressors of working within this organisation”

I’ve got to say, I think each of these misses the mark, and I’ve been struggling to put into words exactly why. The idea that staff should be able to ‘cope’ with everything that is thrown at them and if they can’t they’re ‘just not resilient’… just doesn’t sit right with me. I’d even go so far as to say that I believe that this definition of resilience is one that can be quite destructive to workplace wellness.

When we tell people that resilience is something that they have or have not and simultaneously define it as the ‘ability to cope’, we are also telling them that when they are struggling or aren’t coping so well that they are not resilient people. When we know what we do about negative feedback and its inefficacy at fuelling change , it makes far more sense to encourage strategies to build resilience, than it does to penalise people for struggling from time to time.

Instead, I like to explain resilience as the ability of a person to respond to stressors and adversity in a way that is productive.  A resilient person will feel stress and think, “wow, I’m feeling stressed, how can I best manage my stress so I can keep working effectively?”. A resilient person who is feeling lonely might think “gosh I’m feeling isolated, who can I reach out to right now for support?”.

“It is your reaction to adversity, not the adversity itself that defines how your story will develop” – Deiter F. Uchtdorf

Expecting people to be resilient without supporting resilience building strategies is kind of like expecting people to know how to do a job without first showing them how you want it done and what the ideal outcome looks like. Without good examples of resilience in the workplace, people really don’t have anything to model this behaviour from – so it really does pay to think about your organisation as a whole and what you believe resilience looks like, and starting from the top to model that to your staff.

The hard to swallow pill might be that in order to have resilient workers… your organisation might have to change its approach to help build that resilience in its work force. Potentially, providing resilience training is not enough to build resilience in workers. Similar to how reading a book about golf is not in and of itself going to build a skilful golfer…. But it’s a great start.  

How can you model these behaviours in your workplace? Whether you’re a manager or entry level staff member, every person in the workplace contributes to its culture – think about how and what you’re contributing to organisational resilience. Not only this, but each person also needs to take responsibility for how they are managing their own stressors to build and maintain their resilience as an individual.

Resilience building strategies that are almost too easy to work (but they do!):

• Engaging in meaningful and enjoyable activities
  • Thinking about the things that make you feel your best – learning something new, nurturing something to grow in the garden, reading a great book, spending time with your dog, going for a run, making art. Anything.
    
    
• Self-care
  • Seems simple, but the best way to recharge is to… recharge.
  • Move your body, get enough sleep, breathe in fresh air, get outside in the sunshine, drink water.
    
    
• Social networks
  • Spend time with people who boost your energy rather than drain it.
    
    
• Practice mindfulness
  • Looking after your mind is just as important as looking after your body.
  • Use a guided mindfulness, journal, use grounding strategies, or meditate – anything that keeps you present and in the here and now. 
    

It’s important to note though, sometimes things can just get too much. Even the most resilient people have bad days, and some feelings just demand to be felt. But, feeling the feels does not necessarily make someone less resilient. Suggesting so is not only reductionist but also makes people afraid to embrace their emotions (which we know actually… reduces resilience – go figure).

“Resilience is different than being numb. Resilience means you experience, you feel, you fail, you hurt. You fall, but you keep going.” – Yasmin Mogahed

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