Resilience: a potential paradigm shift for companies or just the newest HR buzzword?
The UK’s HR Magazine published a piece last week exploring the merits of building resilience in the workforce. These days, often the most valuable employees are the most versatile.
Resilient employees are those who can withstand change and stress, adapting as needed to continue performing well and to carry the organization forward successfully. If your company has been doing any belt-tightening in the past several years – and whose hasn’t? – you’re probably intimately familiar with the concept of doing more with less. Running a skeleton crew necessarily means either expanding staff members’ existing responsibilities or cutting certain services.
The article references a leading corporate training firm, In Equilibrium, that offers courses in leadership and personal resilience, instruction to aid workers in managing increased demands and generally coping with challenges in the workplace. The company’s director draws an important distinction between resilience training and education in stress management, however, noting that resilience is about “making people more robust in themselves, making them resilient to stress by being able to say ‘no’ when it’s needed or having the tools to take control.”
The author of Building Resilience for Success, Cary Cooper, delineates the four commonest traits of resilient people: “purposefulness, confidence, adaptability, and the ability to build social supports.” According to Cooper, resilient people are also highly productive, whereas workers who score on the lower end of the resilience methodology are far less so.
Experts caution, however, that resilience training is no panacea; while many think of resilience as a life skill, it’s not so easily taught and it’s complex. Factors such as unsupportive management and toxic work environments can undermine its effect.
Published by Conselium Executive Search, the global leader in compliance search.
