Resilience training – why your business needs it
Resilience is a term that gets bandied about a lot in business. But what is it exactly? Does your company have it? And if not, does it need it?
Let’s take a moment to zoom in on this oft-discussed (yet sometimes misunderstood) quality.
How do you define resilience?
Elsewhere on our website, we’ve defined resilience as the ability to bounce back through challenging times. And let’s face it, times haven’t come much more challenging than the past couple of years.
The global pandemic has affected us all differently. While some of us were directly affected by the illness, others experienced increased anxiety as we monitored how close the illness might come to touching our lives. More than this, though, virtually all of us had to adapt – and fast – to radically new ways of working.
The ’Years of Peak Resilience’
The traditional office – with its easy sociability, comforting routines, water-cooler catch-ups and psychological home/work demarcation – vanished overnight. All of a sudden, work was just you, your kitchen, something called Zoom, and a (hopefully) strong internet connection.
Fast adaptation was the order of the day. And the demands of the virtual world meant you had to look like you were breezing your way through it all. Zoom etiquette meant tidying the kitchen and pinning that fixed smile on your face – even if, internally, you were a bundle of nerves and questions.
Indeed, if resilience can be defined as the ability to survive and even prosper through challenging, disruptive circumstances, then 2020-21 have been the Years of Peak Resilience.
So, resilience – that ability to not be buffeted by adversity, but to progress and even grow from it – is a key attribute in today’s rapidly changing business world, for employees and companies alike. Resilient people are flexible in their thinking, they have the energy and mental agility to quickly change tack and keep on flourishing – and to consistently perform at their highest level, however the parameters around them are changing.
How strong resilience can benefit your business
Let’s unpack some of the ways in which strong resilience across a company and staff can help you to negotiate the choppy waters of today’s business world.
Inspire a more positive mindset
For one thing, you’ll find that a focus on resilience brings benefits for your staff wellbeing. It can bring a new state of mind: an awareness, for example, that a certain level of stress isn’t in fact the end of the world – that it goes with the territory and can be talked about, shared, managed, even harvested for insights and new ways of working.
Teach your staff to manage and live with a reasonable level of stress, rather than seeing it as some unpredictable prowling beast, ever ready to strike, and you’ll have yourself a happier, healthier workforce. You know the next part of the equation: happy, healthy workforce equals improved performance, staff retention, customer satisfaction, and bottom lines.
Improve employee adaptability
Resilience also means, perhaps most obviously, adaptability: the ability to weather the storms. And we’ve seen some storms lately, haven’t we? Business has always been a world where you have to look around you, track changes and adapt in order to flourish. The pandemic was simply this landscape magnified.
A feature of resilience that’s closely linked to adaptability is the ability to learn and innovate – and to make allowances for that process to happen across your team. So, for example, you may see some key new areas in which your staff can keep developing, learn new skills, and step up their performance.
This is all well and good, but be aware that these new techniques will present a steep learning curve for your team. A lot to learn, fast, can impact morale and stress levels – on their resilience, in short. So make sure that you have the training in place for them to get where you want them to be, and be realistic in your expectations of what you want staff to be capable of, and within what time frame.
Nurture a sense of community
Your company resilience can easily come under strain if there are difficult personal relationships within. It’s important to encourage all staff to be both calm and open when discussing any difficulties with colleagues – and also to challenge their own thinking patterns, along with the ways in which they interpret difficult situations. Is that person really out to get me – or are they merely suggesting that, say, this task could be performed in a different way?
Support career development plans
Finally, resilience training should be an integral part of any career development plan. Learning to cope with obstacles in their path – a dispute with a colleague, a challenging project, some negative feedback – will really help your employees develop their skillset, leaving them feeling more empowered, self-determining and, ultimately, happy at work. Again, cue a host of benefits to you, their employer.
Resilience training from Jefferson Talent Group
Part of a wider suite of wellbeing services we can offer to you and your team, our resilience training and support provides a variety of strategies, diagnostics, tactics and tools that help foster greater resilience across your workforce – from teams through managers to leaders.
We’ve built our resilience training to focus specifically on bouncing back from challenges and adversity, on developing that personal strength and wisdom that will stand you all in even better stead the next time challenges come along.
And when they do (as they will), under our guidance you’ll be able to look those challenges in the eye and see them for what they are: opportunities to learn, renew and keep growing as people and as a company.
Resilience, at both a personal and company level, is a quality that will only grow in importance in our increasingly fast-paced, volatile business world. Resilience training for you and your staff can help you all to not only survive change – but to prosper from it, learning new and productive ways of doing things and ensuring a happy, healthy staff who feel empowered with their own career directions.
Why not see what our resilience training and support could bring to your workforce? Contact us today to find out more.
