Workplace Resilience: Thrive Amid Change

Workplace Resilience: Thriving in a Constantly Changing World In today’s fast-paced and uncertain world, workplace resilience has become an essential trait for survival. As we face increasing challenges in our personal and professional lives, developing resilience is crucial for overcoming obstacles and adapting to change.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the numerous benefits of workplace resilience and provide practical strategies to help you cultivate this vital skill.

Understanding Workplace Resilience: What is it and Why is it Important?

Resilience is essentially the ability to cope with setbacks and challenges. It showcases your ability to ‘bounce back’ and continue on with your life in the midst of adversity. It consists of being able to manage your thoughts and emotions, and see challenges and setbacks as opportunities instead of threats. 

Children are born naturally resilient. There is a reason that toddlers often learn through play. When a child makes a mistake, they learn from it. However, as they get older and ‘grow up’, their natural resilience often doesn’t withstand the pressure of societal norms. That, in turn, leads to trauma settling in and them feeling worthless. This is a common pattern with most people.

At work, resilience helps you recover from challenging experiences and aids in your growth and development. It helps you stay motivated and adapt quickly to face difficult situations with ease, which, in turn, makes you less susceptible to burnout. Thus, resilience is closely linked to your mental health, and being resilient is a sign of good mental health. For additional insights on resilience, explore the American Psychological Association’s blog on Building Your Resilience, which offers expert advice on fostering this essential trait. 

The Many Benefits of Fostering Workplace Resilience

A study by CV-Library showed that 57% of employers see resilience itself as an essential skill for candidates, and 71% see the ability to adapt (a core aspect of resilience) as a key skill. Thus, a majority of businesses value resilence as a core skill. Here’s why:

Resilience helps handle challenges better

Being resilient helps you keep a clear head in the face of adversity, and allows you to face the problem calmly and logically. This means that you can focus on finding a solution to the problem instead of assigning blame, allowing you to handle challenges better and faster. 

Resilience improves communication

Resilient people are usually self-assured and confident as well. Thus, as a resilient person, you are more likely to speak up and contribute your ideas and thoughts more clearly and constructively. Such improved communication skills and idea sharing are important for company growth.  

Resilience reduces burnout

During difficult times, you may become stressed and lose your passion for your work, which, in turn, leads to burnout. Being resilient helps you manage stress and retain your passion for what you do, which reduces the chances of burnout as well. 

Resilience creates a competitive business

Businesses need resilient employees who can work well together to ride out changing and difficult times in their industries. As such an employee, you would probably stick around through and after the change, which creates a competitive business. This is especially true since there won’t be any need to retrain you.  

Resilience helps set realistic expectations

Being resilient gives you a clear idea of your’s and other’s needs and boundaries. That, in turn, helps you set realistic expectations without going beyond others and your own capabilities. Thus, everyone will be able to work together amicably and efficiently. 

Resilience improves relationships between colleagues

Resilience often helps you take things less personally, which, in turn, allows you to build better relationships with people, including your colleagues. That way, you will be able to work well together with fewer disagreements and fights.

Resilience opens you to upskill and improve

Resilience promotes a growth mindset and allows you to adapt. This mindset includes being ready to admit when you need to improve and upskill, and openly seeking opportunities to do so. A company with such employees, who are always ready to better themselves, is sure to thrive.

Resilience improves future focus

Being resilient lets you improve your future focus. This means that it allows you to make realistic plans for future growth and follow them. If all, or at least a majority, of the employees of a company were this organized and focused on future growth, the company would only grow.     

Resilience encourages giving and receiving support 

Resilience allows you to have a growth mindset, which means you would reach out for feedback and support when you need it, and would offer the same to others who request it. This helps you overcome challenges and receive support during personal difficulties, which may otherwise affect your work. 

Building Workplace Resilience: A Skill You Can Develop

Building resilience takes time, effort and self-reflection. However it is doable, especially with help from managers and team leaders, who could provide training for it. Here are some tips to help you with building resilience at work:

Key Components of Workplace Resilience: What Makes You Resilient?

There are five main elements of resilience that you need to understand before you can build it. These elements include:

• Emotional Wellbeing
• Inner Drive
• Future Focus
• Relationships
• Physical Health

All of these elements are interlinked and must be equally improved to build resilience in the long term. Once you have an understanding of these elements, you’ll know the ones you are strong at and the ones that need to be improved on. 

Analyze strengths and weaknesses

Feedback from your managers and your peers is the best way to identify and improve on your strengths and weaknesses respectively. Frequent 360 degree feedback for your entire team helps you make it a habit to evaluate yourself and your peers’ performance. This, in turn, helps you identify everyone’s strengths and weaknesses and focus on opportunities for growth and success.   

Enhance emotional wellbeing 

Emotional wellbeing is an extremely important part of resilience, and more often than not, we are the destroyers of our own emotional peace through negative self-talk. This is a deep-rooted pattern with most people, that most probably began in childhood and takes quite a bit of effort to stop. 

One method of getting out of your negative self-talk is to write down the thoughts that you tell yourself and then analyze their validity. It often happens that the thought is not true, or it is no longer true about you. Once you realize that you can replace that thought with a more positive one much faster.   

Boosting Your Inner Drive

Being self-driven is great for both productivity and success at work. It also often helps prevent things from getting overwhelming. 

Effective goal setting is one good way to promote inner drive, and the SMART framework is among the best methods to set effective goals. The SMART Framework helps you set Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time bound goals. Therefore, the framework ensures that the goals are realistic and doable, which, in turn, promotes your inner drive and makes you more confident when you finally attain them.   

Foster future focus

Hope for the future is essential to keep moving forward. One way to foster this hope is to have a growth mindset, which helps you be open and adaptable to change and find solutions to unexpected problems and situations in a healthy manner. 

Additionally, critical thinking and accountability are two skills that add to your growth mindset and will help you foster future focus. Critical thinking allows you to be logical in dire situations, as opposed to swayed by emotions, and being accountable helps you take responsibility for your actions and emotions, and keep going even when you feel down.   

Developing Healthy Relationships

Relationships are important in both personal and professional spheres, but they take time and effort to develop and maintain. Moreover, they cannot really be forced or else they may become toxic. Genuine, healthy connections, on the other hand, leave you feeling understood, supported, and inspired. 

To build such connections, you simply need to be truly interested in other people, no matter their differences in views and values. You do not have to give up your views and values, but ensure that you do not put other people down for theirs. Additionally, finding or becoming a mentor is also a great way to build the core elements of resilience.    

Support physical wellbeing 

Your physical health often affects your mental health and, in turn, your resilience. That’s why it is extremely important to have a proper work-life balance. You can avoid taking work home with you and encourage others around you to do the same. Being organized also helps to achieve this balance. Besides, when you get proper rest after work, you are likely to be a lot more productive the next day. 

Conclusion

As you develop your workplace resilience, it’s essential to remember that resilience is not only a valuable personal trait but also a key leadership quality. In our previous blog post, we discussed the top 12 leadership qualities that make a good leader, and resilience was featured as an important skill for effective leadership.

Thus, resilience is quite important in the workplace and brings many benefits.

Additionally, ongoing development (both personal and professional) is the key to building resilience and when companies encourage such development through training and activities, they help build a better and more resilient workforce.