Sep 16 / Dr. Ronald Rodriguez, PCC

Our Often Unrequited Relationship with Resilience

Resilience has become one of the main buzzwords of our time. Whether you’re in the boardroom, living room, or production floor, you’ve likely heard about the imperative for resilience and how it can drastically change your overall wellbeing and productivity. While research supports this claim, there is little published on how to actually increase your resilience and overcome symptoms of burnout, stress, and overwhelm.

In this blog post, we will explore what resilience actually means, why it is becoming what some would call an urgent lever for organizational and professional success, and tactics on how to build and sustain it. Our goal is to shed more light on how resilience is a behavioral practice and imperative, not a “soft skill” that can have a significant impact on your workforce and organizational success. We also hope that upon reading further, you will gain some hope and confidence in your journey to being resilient and conquering the challenges your organization and you face on a seemingly ceaseless basis.

What is Resilience?

The American Psychological Association defines resilience as the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life situations through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands (APA, 2015). Upon closer examination of this definition, the word “successfully” jumps out as highly intrinsic to each person in that success means something different to everyone. That said, a few key elements of resilience hold true en masse.

  1. Adaptation: Adapting to our environments, context, and situations can be disorienting and daunting, particularly if we’re not in the right mindset to do so.

  2. Mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility: Difficult and challenging situations we face in the workplace and in life have an emotional and physiological impact that mitigate our ability to be flexible.

  3. External and internal demands: 81% of workers report they are “less resilient” or “vulnerable” (Buckingham, Chumney, & Hayes, 2020) while external and internal demands continue to rise in our daily and professional lives. 

Based on the above, one can conclude the development and maintenance of resilience must continually evolve and adapt. As increased workloads and pressures are leading to more time spent working, It is also highly impacted by our professional environments. As such, let’s explore the impacts a lack of resilience has on workforces and how they can be overcome. 

Impacts to the Organization

According to recent research by McKinsey & Company, there are three main reasons workforces are struggling to build and maintain resilience. 

  1. Prolonged Stress: Stress is a part of our everyday lives and careers; yet, prolonged stress and anxiety wreak havoc on our emotional and physical well being. In fact, $190 billion was spent on work related stress health conditions in 2023 alone (Greenberg et all. , 2023). Furthermore, an additional $211 billion is spent annually on poor mental health (depression and anxiety) (Greenberg et all. , 2023) which is often a consequence of prolonged stress.

  2. Demanding Workloads: Continued shifts in consumer demands, increased competitive factors, and unfamiliar and fast evolving technologies create increasing pressures on the volume and quality of work that is required of employees today. In fact, demanding workloads accounted for over $48 billion in U.S. healthcare expenditures in 2022 alone (Goh, Pfifer, & Zenios, 2023). As companies continue to restructure and organize around emerging strategic priorities and macroeconomic conditions, this trend is likely to continue.

  3. Limited Autonomy: As pressures and demands increase, leaders often shift to a command and control and micromanagement mentality. While often good intentioned, these leadership behaviors create elevated levels of anxiety and a feeling of “being stuck and simply going with the motions” for employees. This problem is compounded by the conflicting messages leaders commonly share with employees to take more ownership and be more self-directed, generating confusion and compounding the stress they are already feeling.

65% of U.S. employees view their job as the number 1 stressor in their lives. Since research has suggested prolonged stress leads to a myriad of mental and physical health concerns, it is not surprising that our professional lives can quickly become the number 1 detractor of resilience. What can we do, as professionals, to combat these challenges to build and maintain resilience and how can organizations support our efforts? 

Individual Tactics to Build Resilience

As individuals, it can be difficult to ascertain how best to build resilience and even more difficult to know when we need to build it. The American Heart Association, in their 2023 study on workplace stress, found that an inability to focus, chronic fatigue, irritability, and even hyper-awareness and sensitivity to others can all be signals that we are burned out and could benefit from an elevated resilience practice. In the absence of any form of corporate training or sponsored coaching, here are a few helpful tactics you can implement to start your resilience journey. 

  1. Understand your circle of control: In Stephen R. Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, he introduced the circle of control as a mechanism to be more productive. We suggest it is also a great resource for resilience in that battling prolonged stress, increased pressures, and even toxic environments can make us feel out of control, anxious, and helpless to take action. Understanding the elements of your professional and personal lives that are within your control, can be acted on, and your most immediate first step is fundamental in becoming more resilient.

  2. Task Chunking: As we have learned and likely experienced, increased workloads have become a professional norm. Task chunking or time blocking is the simple act of creating focus where it is needed on a singular task at any given time. Then, take a small break (5 - 10 minutes to stretch, let your mind rest, etc.), and start the next task. Ultimately, this process helps maximize your neurocognitive performance, mitigate fatigue, and can lead to higher levels of productivity.

  3. Establish and Maintain Guardrails: Guardrails between your professional and personal lives can have a profound impact on your ability to manage stress, compartmentalize, and benefit from adequate rest and recuperation. Effective guardrails can include starting and stopping work at the same time each day, creating a small ritual (walk around the block, listen to a song) immediately following your workday and prior to engaging in your personal life, and even avoiding phone screen time up to two hours prior to going to bed to allow your brain ample time to rest. Research has shown that these simple rituals, if practiced regularly, can have a profound impact on our mood, ability to manage healthy levels of stress, and even engage more fully with our colleagues, families, and friends.

How Organizations Help Workforces Build Resilience

Supporting workplace resilience has been a heavily discussed topic over the past several years. Surprisingly, only 27% of organizations have implemented some form of resilience training and coaching to support their employees’ abilities to develop such a critical mindset and behavior (American Heart Association, 2023). There are countless strategies that have been published to support resilient workforces while three have risen to the top of the list in order of impact. 

  1. Listen to Your Workforce: Stress, burnout, and fatigue show up differently for us all. Creating safe, productive, and encouraged spaces to hear how workplace challenges are impacting wellbeing and resilience is a fundamental yet the most critical step in supporting employees. Creating equitable resources for everyone based on what is heard has greatly benefited organizations like Garmin, Health Partners, and Unilever in the form of retaining top talent, increasing productivity, and improving employee and team morale.

  2. Create Realistic Expectations: Results and achieving organizational goals is critical, and so is how they are achieved. Unrealistic timelines, creating unnecessary work (the parade of power-point presentations and sending endless summaries to everyone), and celebrating overtime and weekend emails is often viewed by leaders as simply “sink or swim” or creating an environment to push past plateaus. In reality, asking employees what is feasible and partnering with frontline leaders on determining what resources and support are needed to achieve organizational goals is far more impactful and healthy for everyone.

  3. Provide Resilience Training: I was once told by my former leader that greatness is achieved through adversity which gave me the complete wrong impression of what “good looks like” and how to show up in the workplace. Stories like this are rampant in the thousands of leaders I’ve coached and trained so it is no wonder that resilience is often misunderstood. Resilience training helps uncover what resilience is, how to achieve it, and how to avoid the negative ramifications one can face when lacking resilience. 

Fluence Resilience Training - Conquering Burnout and Enhancing Productivity

By now, I’m sure we’ve all seen the endless parade of Linkedin cards and posts, three day bootcamps, “just five minutes of your time will change your life” messages, and even comprehensive programs that promise to resolve burnout and create healthier and happier workforces. While well intended and often helpful, we have found that creating a resilience training program is only as effective as how well they are designed for your unique context. At Fluence, our resilience training programs are anchored in:

  1. The Latest Neuroscience and DEIB Research: Our turnkey solutions are designed to maximize neurocognitive performance, get underneath what is creating burnout in the organization, and implement an equitable approach to building resilience. One size does not fit all when it comes to removing barriers to productivity and adaptability. Leaders of color and other marginalized identities face a myriad of challenges that add layered dimensions of stress and overwhelm to their ability to be resilient. Our design approach and thought leadership allows us to partner closely with L&D leaders to deeply understand their needs and meet them precisely where they are.

  2. Accessibility: Bespoke, just-in-time, and impactful training programs on any topic can be very costly! Due to our scaled design approach and expertise in leadership development, Fluence offers comprehensive training programs that generate immediate and lasting impacts on understanding resilience, how to build it, and how to sustain it at the individual and organizational level in an accessible and budget conscious manner. Simply let us know your timeline, budget, and needs and we’ll take it from there.
  3. Action: Resilience programs often feel theoretical and hypothetical which can create awareness and knowledge of what resilience actually means. Ultimately, your workforce needs tools, strategies, frameworks, and effective suggestion templates that are meaningful to them in their context and can be implemented right away. Our skill based design approach is action focused and provides the foundation by which one can become resilient or elevate their resilience practice. 
With growing pressures on time, budget, and mental wellness there has never been a better time to invest in your workforces’ resilience. We invite you to join us in our mission to revolutionize how workforces are trained and developed. Contact us to learn how we can partner with you and provide transformational training and coaching that will catalyze your growth and success! 

Sources
  1. Buckingham, Marcus., Dr. Chumney, Frances., & Dr. Hayes, Mary (2020). 10 Facts About Resilience - Executive Summary. ADP.

  2. American Psychological Association. Stress in America survey press release. Accessed September 2024.

  3. Center for Workplace Mental Health. Improving Resilience is Important. Accessed September 2024.

  4. Covey, Stephen, R. (2004). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. FranklinCovey.

  5. Goh J, Pfeffer J, Zenios SA. The relationship between workplace stressors and mortality and health costs in the United States. Management Science. 2015;62(2):608-628.

  6. Manor, Dana., Park, Michael., & Weddle, Brooke. (2022). Raising the Resilience of Your Organization. McKinsey & Company.