Building resilience in the workplace: strategies for stress management and wellbeing
- May 2024
Resilience is a big buzzword in business right now – and I agree. Having resilience in the workplace is what sets a high-performing team apart. Research actually shows that as little as 15% of employees are resilient within companies that don’t offer stress and wellbeing initiatives.
So how can you start leading better with your team’s health in mind? And what are the latest stress management techniques useful for building workplace resilience?
This is what you need to know.
What makes a resilient team?
Resilient teams are typically the best at bouncing back when faced with a setback. It’s about how you all recover when the hardest adversity hits you – how to learn and adapt from the experience.
There’s a special type of power in using challenges to your advantage and seeing them as an opportunity for real development.
We’re all sentient beings and emotional intelligence is a crucial skill that strengthens interpersonal relationships – giving us a heightened social awareness. I think the most emotionally intelligent leaders do so with their hearts and minds. It’s about finding the balance between empathising and making rational decisions.
Why is resilience in the workplace important?
What might be stressing your team out?
Whether we like it or not, stress is a natural part of daily life. Common stress triggers in the workplace include:
- Workload and deadlines: Excessive work is demanding, especially if high workloads are also set to tight deadlines. Say hello to burnout if that’s the case!
- Interpersonal conflicts: Tensions between team members can lead to a toxic work environment. In fact, some studies show up to 85% of employees experience workplace conflict at some point in their lives.
- Business changes and uncertainty: Excessive restructuring and stressful layoffs are a big trigger for anxiety. No one likes that level of unpredictability.
- Lack of recognition: Feeling undervalued and unappreciated can seriously demotivate employees. Only 1 in 3 workers agreed they received praise for good work in the past seven days.
How to build more workplace resilience
Knowing how to build resilience as a leader comes from experience. But ultimately, it’s pretty simple: treat your employees as human people first. If you don’t, it’ll only come back to bite you on your productivity.
Recognise the warning signs of stress and implement crucial strategies to address them. This could include things like:
- Looking out for changes in behaviour, including irritability, fatigue, and withdrawal from duties.
- Always encourage open communication so team members feel safe discussing what’s making them stressed.
- Bring in mindfulness programmes/meditation sessions and encourage regular breaks/mental health days.
- Give your team more freedom to manage their own workloads to reduce unnecessary feelings of overwhelm. Trust, trust, trust!
- Set up a worthy recognition process to acknowledge outstanding work and drive some incentive.
- If you can, promote a healthy work-life balance with robust boundaries, flexible working hours, and remote working options.
I can help you build resilience in the workplace…
…whether it’s coming up with some suitable stress management techniques for your team or helping you build more resilience in your individual work life.