How to Improve Team Member Resilience

“Employee engagement and retention today means understanding an empowered workforce’s desire for flexibility, creativity, and purpose.”

‍

In this blog, we delve into team resilience and share executive coaching insights so you can create a team of outstanding performers in your business.

‍

Whether it’s financial pressures, family dynamics, or personal hurdles, we are all under some kind of pressure. Left unchecked, this stress can negatively impact our mental and physical health.

‍

We can all protect our health and wellbeing by boosting resilience. So, as a leader, it’s important to help our employees build resilience for their own personal growth, which in turn creates a stronger, happier, better performing workforce.

‍

What is resilience?

‍

The ability to adapt well in the face of adversity, stress, threats, or tragedy.

‍

Resilience doesn’t mean you don’t experience hardship or difficulty or are unaffected by it. Resilience means, during times of struggle, there’s a mindset and ability to overcome it. To bounce back.

‍

While it’s a naturally human ability, the potency of our individual resilience is affected by many factors, including our life experiences. The good news is, it can be learned and strengthened, at any age.

‍

Studies have shown that resilience-building is highly effective in reducing the impacts of stress and protecting general mental health.

‍

Benefits of Team Resilience

‍

With resilience, we can achieve greater things. Difficulty and challenge can be a triumph or transformation, not a cause for stress that negatively affects our outcomes.

‍

Resilience has been linked to better learning and academic achievement; less absences from work from sickness; less risk-taking and unhealthy behaviours like addiction or excess; greater satisfaction and a longer life.

‍

The alternative, a lack of resilience, can pull us down into stress, mental ill health, the inability to focus to reach goals and poor physical health.

‍

How to Build Team Resilience

‍

At the core of supporting others to build resilience lies in kindness and enhancing well-being.

·        Physical health, diet, and exercise. Provide education, facilitate employee time, and encourage a culture that prioritises health and values being active. Ensure a work-life balance that allows staff to ‘clock-off’ for mental respite and good sleep habits.

·        Time out. Relaxing helps us manage stress leaving us better able to face what’s in front of us. Educate and facilitate relaxation, with work-life balance. Consider providing meditation sessions, partnerships with a local wellbeing centre, lunchtime yoga classes, the list is endless!

·        Future goals. Looking forward to achieving an aspirational goal, an event or celebration is uplifting. Support employees in setting and achieving “fun” goals, as well as work-related milestones.

·        Social and professional support. Having people around us, belonging to a group, and access to professional help when needed it are vital to our resilience. Fostering a social, connected workplace as well as pathways to counselling or psychological services can be a great way to enhance resilience.

·        Lead by example. When your employees see you personify and practice resilience building, it will set the example, motivating others in their own efforts to build resilience.

‍

Resilient employees mean a resilient business, which can see it’s way through the ups and downs of markets cycles, changes in the industry and upheavals like the recent Covid pandemic.

‍

To find out how you can further fortify your business, contact us for a complimentary chat.

‍

Suzzanne Laidlaw is an Author and internationally accredited CEO & Business Coach, helping business owners and executives to earn more, work less and build a business that is profitable and scalable.

‍