· Tricia Tan  · 7 min read

A Guide to Building a Resilient Workplace

Developing a resilient team is the best way to ensure your employees remain healthy and that your company remains operational during a crisis.

Employees today deal with a lot of stress, from the pressures of work and personal life to the continuously changing cultural and economic circumstances.

Worker performance may suffer as a result of this mounting pressure. And you know what happens; business is harmed when this occurs.

Developing a resilient team is the greatest method to ensure that your employees remain healthy and that your company remains operational during a crisis. Resilient workforces can recover from setbacks and keep moving forward even after fixing problems.

So, how do you build one? Let’s find out.

Building a resilient workplace

Assess: What’s holding your team back?

It’s one thing to encourage your team to bounce back higher. But don’t you agree that encouragement and support are more genuine from a place of understanding?

Putting yourself in your team’s shoes won’t hurt—in fact, it will strengthen your employees’ trust and respect for you. Employees who feel valued and heard will be even more loyal and motivated to continue doing good.

What can be your team’s stressors? Here are some factors that are maybe holding your team back:

A heavy workload

Employees with a lot to do and work long hours become exhausted and stressed. If your workload is too heavy, you should first concentrate on setting priorities.

Examine your jobs and projects, then arrange them according to due dates. What can your team start doing less of, stop doing altogether, or do better?

Change

Employees could have many questions regarding the status of your company, your sector, or the future of their career, especially in uncertain times.

Therefore, even though you might not always be able to provide them with entirely satisfactory or specific responses, you can over-communicate the information that you do have.

Employees can regain control by receiving any level of assurance. In addition, employee trust and clarity can be significantly increased through transparent leadership.

Lack of recognition

Everybody needs a pat on the back sometimes.

Workplace recognition makes you feel good about yourself. When your contributions are acknowledged, it makes you feel validated.

Imagine how significant the effect would be on your team’s morale if you cultivated a culture of recognition. Then, you can expect motivated employees to look for opportunities to do better constantly.

Without recognition, you can only expect the opposite—disgruntled employees who are probably looking for the next opportunity.

What is resilience?

Resilience is the capacity to bounce back from adversity and seize the chance to learn from it. For example, resilience in the workplace might involve overcoming obstacles and learning from mistakes.

Managers can provide benefits like paid time off and resilience-building seminars that help enhance workplace resilience and safeguard their employees’ mental health.

Employees should develop their resilience by taking on new challenges and being humble. In addition, managers may help their teams build strength by fostering a culture that is forgiving of errors.

Resilient employees can better control their stress and are inspired to take on problems head-on. The following are a few reasons to support the value of resilience in the workplace:

  • Resilience can help individuals feel happier with their jobs since it gives them strategies for dealing with stress and reducing anxiety associated with the workplace.
  • Employee self-esteem is raised because resilient workers are more capable of handling difficulties at work with assurance and optimism.
  • Resilient individuals understand that tackling difficulties at work can be made simpler when they can rely on their coworkers for support; therefore, it can help teams establish a healthy work environment.
  • Resilient workers see obstacles as opportunities to improve their abilities and learn from mistakes. They see obstacles at work as chances to advance in their careers.
  • Communication is enhanced by resilient workers’ openness to feedback, their efforts to resolve problems with coworkers, and the climate they establish for frank discussion in the face of conflict.
  • Because resilient workers are more accustomed to the thought of failure, they might be more willing to take calculated risks by experimenting with new ideas, leading team projects, and sharing their own.

How do you build a resilient team?

An adaptable workforce will evaluate the problem and find solutions. They’ll generate fresh concepts and aid the organization’s progress amid trying circumstances.

Here are some tips for developing workplace resilience:

Define and integrate the company’s fundamental values

A company’s dedication to defining and adhering to its core principles directly affects the strength of its culture. It would be unreasonable to expect your staff to adopt a culture they have no control over.

Therefore, the first stage in developing resilience is to find a limited collection of core values—three to six are recommended as best practices—that serve as the company’s operating guiding principles.

These corporate principles must be thoroughly defined through a careful process to be relied upon during times of transition.

After these fundamental values have been determined, everything should follow them, including corporate objectives and company processes. Your workers will benefit from this step’s consistency and sense of stability.

Use the input of the workforce

It’s critical to keep an eye on the employee experience before, during, and after periods of change once the cultural values have been firmly established.

Positive or bad, feedback is a terrific method to gauge how your team is doing and how much stress, anxiety, confusion, or unhappiness they feel. In addition, feedback from workers in real-time can be used to spot concerns and find solutions before they cause disruptions at work.

Yet having a baseline to compare against is necessary to discover hot areas in real-time. Regularly gathering employee input makes it simple to rapidly identify a problem as soon as it appears before it becomes more challenging to solve.

Regular feedback can be collected with pulse surveys, check-ins, and one-on-one interviews.

Differentiating between common difficulties and potential concerns resulting from workplace changes is made possible by having both a baseline and a mechanism for routinely collecting employee feedback.

Create efficient communication tactics

Building a resilient workplace requires strong communication between leadership and the rest of the business because strong communication promotes trust, a crucial engagement driver.

While managers and leaders may not be able to disclose all information about changes occurring, being as open and honest as possible boosts employee confidence in a successful end and lessens worry.

Humans naturally begin to make assumptions, which are frequently incorrect, when change is underway, and there needs to be more communication.

They may even unknowingly spread false information around the organization.

A communication gap during times of change can cause employees to worry about their jobs, speculate about the company’s future, and lose sight of the overarching objectives and mission of the organization.

These worries result from lower productivity, increased turnover, and decreased workplace morale.

A culture of resilience can be fostered by having an effective communication plan, which can help lessen anxiety and concern during times of change. While having open conversations with employees during trying times may be unpleasant, the outcome will be well worth the effort.

Build an efficient workflow

A streamlined and centralized HR solution like Hezum can effectively boost your workflow.

Hezum can cut unnecessary stress—whether requesting time off, tracking a department in-charge contact details, getting onboarded, or simply locating and accessing a file. Hezum is a platform that lets you do these and more with ease.

When you have the routine tasks down pat with the help of an HR platform, your team is more agile and capable of handling whatever changes life may throw at your business.

To summarize

In today’s world, change is a given, and it will only accelerate in the future.

Change will likely be successfully navigated, and success will be attained if businesses are encouraged to cultivate a culture of resilience.

When creating a resilient workplace, don’t wait for the unanticipated change to have an adverse effect. Instead, put effective measures in place right away to create a robust and agile workplace to handle both big and little changes as they occur.

Visit our website or schedule a demo to learn more about Hezum today.

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