Mental Resilience in The Workplace

These huge challenges and societal changes are creating an unprecedented level of uncertainty, that’s testing the mental resilience of us all.

Why do Emotions Belong in The Workplace?

Emotions are the sensations and chemistry that mobilise us. They’re the essential fuel of human behaviour, and any attempt to deny our emotions, not only misses a huge opportunity but causes problems. Our emotions exist, we don’t choose them. The only question is, what do we do with them?

Today’s emotions are tomorrow’s performance

What is Mental Resilience?

Can it be Learnt, or is it Inherent?

We’re all born with a predisposition towards being more or less resilient in certain circumstances, but our genetics are only a starting template for the way that we are. Our genes are turned on and off throughout our life, so we don’t have a pre-defined genetic template that we can’t change.

What’s absolutely key in terms of resilience is the things that we learn, especially as a young child. In particular, in the first three years of our lives, the emotional template of our brain is created. If we’re encouraged, feel safe, and are nurtured, we feel that the world can be trusted. This creates a level of resilience for us.

Alternatively, as a young child, if we’re brought up in a situation where the world is a scary place, we’re going to become very threat orientated and it’s difficult to establish a level of resilience for the experiences we face later in life.

How Can Resilience & Wellbeing be Built Into a Thriving Culture?

Organisations need to establish a culture that balances performance with the wellbeing of the individual. Many organisations focus too much, or solely on performance. When a huge enforced change comes along, like with the Covid-19 crisis, it means that any flaws in the culture of an organisation become accentuated and the cracks appear. 

Organisations that focus purely on performance will have to radically rethink their cultures. Organisations can no longer operate in a paradigm of believing that the people at the top maintain control and have all the answers. The pace of change today and the availability of information and technology mean it’s a broken model. Today’s leaders must embrace the speed of change and collaborate with their people to find solutions to make their organisations sustainable over the long-term.

Creating a culture with open listening and communication requires a huge amount of education, and can’t be constructed in just one conversation. A good leader knows that their platform is built upon the people around them. Everyone will change as a result of the Covid-19 experience, and resilience is a challenge we all face. We see through our data at The Happiness Index that the organisations who continually listen and communicate back have happier, more productive people. People love being part of a team or organisation that is thriving and successful.

There are 3 steps to making listening & communicating an instinctive habit:

1. Provide meaning – give your people something to believe it and a clear sense of direction 

2. Establish trust – once you have trust you’ll find that your people will want to engage

3. Build new habits and behaviour – by creating daily routines

The opportunity cost of doing things wrong is huge. All business leaders must think about the long-term sustainability of their business and the resilience of their people is a key component of this. 

Watch Webinar on Demand

This blog summarises the discussion from our webinar. Prefer to listen? You can watch it on catch up here.

Start Listening to Your People

The only way to find out how your own people are feeling is to listen to them. Every organisation is different and has their own challenges. Gather employee happiness data from within your organisation to gain greater context on the specific highs and lows that are affecting your people via surveys and direct communication.

Learn more about our employee engagement and happiness platform and how we can help you.