The importance of resilience
1. the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
If the events of 2020 have shown us anything, it is that these setbacks will always occur, and having strategies to cope with them is just as important as trying to prevent them. The ability to withstand the setbacks that we encounter, and to bounce back after them, has long been recognised as an important trait to foster and develop. Although it is a personal characteristic, there are still things an organisation can do to promote resilience amongst their employees and the organisation itself which all helps towards improving employee engagement.
Wellbeing and Support Study
As part of our Coronavirus Well-being and Support Study, we’ve been focusing on Resilience as one of our three main topic areas, and we’re exploring how well organisations are doing in terms of supporting their employees’ resilience. This topic is especially relevant at the moment, as many employees will be feeling increased stress and pressure due to higher workloads, caring commitments, a lack of leisure activities or the ability to visit loved ones, and of course, the backdrop of the pandemic itself.
One of the most important things an organisation can do to promote its employees’ resilience is to ensure that it communicates well with them. Employees generally understand that organisations are having difficulty planning ahead at the moment, but they still value honest and timely updates on the situation, even if it’s just to say that leaders are considering their options or to say that they are aware of the struggles that employees are facing. Clear plans and new guidelines may be necessary in order to inform or reassure staff about aspects of their work that have had to change. When are offices to re-open, and will everyone be expected to come back to them? What measures are in place to ensure their health and safety? These are the kinds of questions that employees will expect definitive answers to, and an effective communication strategy can help to allay many of their fears around them.
Future prospects
Many furloughed employees are becoming increasingly worried about their job prospects, and although not all organisations will be able to reassure them fully, they can help by keeping in regular communication with furloughed staff, and ensuring that they are coping as best they can, and do not feel forgotten about. Meanwhile, staff in some organisations have felt that, after being ignored whilst on furlough, they were told to come back at very short notice. Some employees might find this kind of oversight understandable, but others may feel as a result that they are undervalued.
An important and basic need for any employee is feeling that there are people within the organisation to talk to about personal concerns. The current climate brings difficulties here, too. Managers may have increased workloads and find themselves unable to support their staff as fully as they normally could. The general climate of fear and uncertainty that has come along with the pandemic has also taken its toll on many people’s well-being, meaning that they may need more support.
Many employees who are finding for the first time that they need additional support may be unsure how to access it, and in this case, it is essential that organisations take the time to signpost their own or external sources of support and make sure that these are easy to access. People who feel intimidated or awkward accessing this support may also need reassurance about what is involved. Organisations cannot adapt to this increased pressure overnight, but what they can do is to begin to identify these issues and learn more about them, with a view to providing increased support in the future.
Finding a balance
Further, employees are facing new issues that they have not had to deal with before, especially around remote working and the need to balance workloads against caring commitments, such as childcare or looking after elderly relatives. The stress of balancing these roles against full-time work can affect resilience severely. For this reason, many organisations are finding that they must be more flexible in areas such as workload and task allocation, as employees would otherwise be unable to fulfil both their work and personal commitments.
As well as allowing this flexibility where necessary, organisations can reassure their employees by letting them know that they are considering their circumstances when making decisions. The comments we receive tell us that people want these difficulties to be acknowledged by the leadership, both in terms of flexibility and in terms of the organisation thanking them for their hard work. In this crucial period, it is also vitally important that organisations listen to what their employees have to say: their praise, criticisms and suggestions. Organisations can not only show their employees that they genuinely have their interests at heart, but they can also generate new ideas, as well as assessing how their current practices are working. An employee survey, possibly with questions tailored specifically towards the organisation’s response to the pandemic, is a great way to do this.
To find out how we can help you understand your employee’s level of resilience, or to discuss our employee survey services, 360 feedback surveys, pulse surveys or general staff surveys, contact us at info@surveyinitiative.co.uk or phone us on +44 (0)1255 870735.