Resilience Training in the Workplace (+Examples, Tips)
- January 27, 2023
As humans, we all encounter adversity, difficulties, and hardships in life. The ability to bounce back or adapt after enduring these difficulties is called resilience. It’s a quality that allows individuals to face challenges, find their way past them, and emerge with a new sense of strength and understanding they can take with them moving forward.
An individual’s history, access to resources, and general life situation can affect how well they can develop resilience at a given time. Ultimately, we all have the capacity to become resilient. It isn’t simply an innate quality that some people possess while others don’t. Resilience can be learned and built on over time.
We often think about resilience in terms of personal trials and tribulations, but this quality is also critical to professional success. The ability to apply resilience in workplace situations can be the difference between propelling forward and lagging behind.
Because resilience is such an important quality to nurture, organizations are now turning to formalized resilience training for their employees.
What is Resilience Training?
Resilience training initiatives help employees develop an agile mindset and equip them to tackle workplace challenges. This type of employee training can be carried out in various ways, depending on the needs of an organization. Lessons can be virtual consisting of interactive video lessons or curated activities, or in-person led by a seasoned expert.
Resilience training in the workplace often focuses on developing skills to recognize and regulate emotions, building self-esteem, setting achievable goals, and understanding the extent of one’s role in a situation and the limits of what one can control.
The Importance of Resilience Training in the Workplace
Employees spend many of their waking hours thinking about work and how it affects their personal lives. This means work can feel like an all-consuming stressor without the right toolset.
Resilience training equips employees with the flexibility, agility, and wisdom to handle tough situations like losing a client or not being selected for a promotion. It helps them put setbacks in perspective and move on to the next opportunity for success. With each triumph, confidence increases, and team members become more eager to take on the next challenge.
Overall, resilience training in the workplace is crucial because it is a solid investment in a business’s most valuable resource – its employees. Providing resilience training to employees demonstrates a commitment to cultivating a positive work environment and providing opportunities for team members to grow. When effectively carried out, resilience training can improve employees’ emotional well-being and empower them to reach their full potential.
Benefits of Resilience Training in the Workplace
Resilience training provides numerous benefits to employees and the companies they work for.
1. Boost productivity, focus, and ingenuity
When employees learn how to hone resilience in their day-to-day lives, they are primed to be more effective employees. Resilience enables them to handle stress better, solve problems, finish tasks without being overwhelmed, and try new approaches to improve outcomes.
2. Improve employee well-being
Resilience training is an integral component of employee wellness. It equips employees with the tools to care for themselves, ask for guidance, set boundaries, and put stressful situations in perspective. Resilience also helps improve physical health by reducing the physical effects stress has on the human body.
All these behaviors increase self-sufficiency and confidence, leading to overall employee well-being. When resilient employees understand how to cope with stress, they feel better, tend to show up more often, and are more prepared to handle their daily tasks.
3. Smooth out change management
Big changes at work, such as department reorganization or new technology rollouts, can leave your employees feeling confused and frustrated. The skills employees learn in resilience training can be applied to change management to help employees feel more comfortable with the changes, supported, and well-equipped to handle any transition.
4. Better workplace relationships
Honing resilience helps employees feel more confident in their interactions with coworkers and even improves communication skills to manage workplace relationships. Many of the skills taught in resilience training can be applied to intrapersonal conflict resolution scenarios to smooth out communications and improve employee experience all around.
Examples of Resilience in the Workplace
Resilience is a quality that can be beneficial in many aspects of work life, including
- Inheriting tasks left by a departed team member.
- Changes in company structure.
- Changes to business processes and operations.
- Learning new software at work.
- Lost sales, clients, or accounts.
- Navigating communications with team members or clients.
- Not being selected for an opportunity or promotion. .
This list is not comprehensive, and situations can be specific to an employee’s line of business or even industry. But, starting here, it’s clear that the skills associated with resilience can be applied to just about any workplace challenge to bring out a positive effect.
8 Ways to Implement Resilience Training in the Workplace
Resilience is a quality that can be beneficial in many aspects of work life, including
- Inheriting tasks left by a departed team member.
- Changes in company structure.
- Changes to business processes and operations.
- Learning new software at work.
- Lost sales, clients, or accounts.
- Navigating communications with team members or clients.
- Not being selected for an opportunity or promotion. .
This list is not comprehensive, and situations can be specific to an employee’s line of business or even industry. But, starting here, it’s clear that the skills associated with resilience can be applied to just about any workplace challenge to bring out a positive effect.
1. Understand employees
In order to empower employees to overcome challenges, it’s critical to understand the particular types of adversity and stressors that they face at work. This might mean conducting surveys across departments or putting together focus groups to establish a baseline.
Depending on the industry, there might be particular challenges to incorporate into training or roleplaying scenarios to improve retention and success.
2. Set goals
From the start, it’s critical to spell out and document the intended outcomes and goals of resilience training. Look at the baseline you established with surveys or any productivity metrics that may have been collected to set goals for future improvements. This way, the benefits of resilience training will be apparent and demonstrable to leadership wanting to understand the return on investment.
3. Get leadership buy-in
Speaking of leadership, it is always beneficial to get buy-in from executives and other decision-makers when building a new learning and development initiative. This helps the planning team secure the resources necessary to roll out training and monitor its effects.
4. Implement wellness programs
Formalized resilience training can be incorporated into existing wellness programs or rolled out as an indicator that the organization is committed to providing resources to improve overall employee well-being.
5. Encourage resilience training through company policy and resources
Resilience training should be incorporated into operation manuals and other company policy documents to reinforce its importance. Managers and leaders must encourage team members to participate in training as well.
Furthermore, company documents should be able to point out how the skills honed during resilience training can be recalled in employees’ day-to-day work activities and help them maintain a manageable work-life balance.
6. Provide online training courses
Depending on the needs of your organization, online training courses can be a good option to deliver resilience training. There are various options available for online resilience training through dedicated corporate training programs and LMS platforms. These solutions can be cost-effective and help employees become more resilient without necessarily taking much time away from their daily work.
7. Build a resilient work culture
To bolster the effects of workplace resilience training, resilience should be incorporated into the broader company culture through wellness activities and other opportunities to practice resilience in low-stakes scenarios. This might mean holding meditation workshops, making time for journaling or breathing exercises, or encouraging stress-reducing activities like exercise.
8. Bring in an expert
If possible, bringing in a resilience expert for in-person or virtual training can be an energizing and effective choice of delivering resilience training.
In the end, resilience is a quality that employees need to effectively handle workplace challenges and hardships. When businesses invest in resilience training, they are investing in their employees to help them reduce stress, improve coping skills, and become more successful individuals.
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