The Great Reset.
The Great Reshuffle.
The Great Resignation.
The current period of employees demanding better workplaces for themselves and others has been given many names. One of the central focuses is the desire for workplaces that care and personal tools for wellbeing.
In this blog post, Strong Cincinnati explains the need employees have for emotional resilience to flourish and thrive. We offer six methods for boosting resilience and wellbeing in your employees.
Why Do We Need Resilience At Work?
The way we view good workers in our society is a mix of things. For example, a “good” worker may be viewed as the one who gives everything of themselves-out of their time, their energy, and their life- to focus on their job. A “good” worker may be the one who comes in early and stays late. While those are recipes for burnout rather than a positive workplace culture, employees do need a level of emotional resilience to succeed vs. survive. If employees try to be everything to everyone, the potential of moving away from flourishing and thriving becomes higher.
“Flourishing is the peak of well-being: You have a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others. Depression is the valley of ill-being: You feel despondent, drained, and worthless. Languishing is the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not functioning at full capacity.”-Adam Grant, New York Times
Are you concerned you or your staff is not thriving but languishing? While the present challenges are real and not going away, your character strengths help you bounce back quicker. Understanding and applying your strengths can make you more resilient.
What Is The Purpose of Working?
Most of us can answer what we do for work. We can also use our day-to-day tasks to answer how we do our work. Knowing the deeper purpose behind it, or why we do our work, has a significant impact on our energy, especially during times of stress.
Your strengths are key to a clear understanding of why you do the work you do every single day. What brought you to your field? Was it an opportunity to pass on knowledge you’ve learned in your career? (Love of Learning, Perspective) Was it to support and encourage the people around you on their journey? (Love, Social Intelligence, Kindness) Do you have a passion for asking and answering all the questions? (Curiosity)
What do you love about your everyday work? Take time to reflect on your values, preferences, skills, and strengths. Tapping into your unique strengths that initially drew you to your field will help you develop a strong sense of purpose.
“Being really anchored in your purpose, being really clear about what you want to be doing in life, helps you deal with challenges and setbacks.”- Elena Aguilar, Onward: Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Teachers
How Do You Build Community at Work?
Developing habits that nurture relationships with colleagues, staff, and administrators can strengthen our resilience. Work can be challenging at the best of time, let alone during a Great Reset, so having a strong support network and trusted relationships helps to build our resilience.
If you’re the manager of a team or executive of an organization, find practical ways to encourage the health and well-being of the staff in your building. Be a safe space to bring questions and challenges. Building trust in those relationships will allow it to be a source of strength all year.
Do You Focus on The Positive?
At this current moment, we might (rightfully so) roll our eyes at the constant pressure to be positive at all times. While we are advocating for remembering the things that go well, we are not promoting a ‘head-in-the-sand-and-ignore’ approach to the real challenges employees are facing.
All humans have a negativity bias. Everything that is challenging or potentially a threat, no matter how small, is something our brains hone in on. For example, you might find yourself focusing on the few colleagues who aren’t doing their part versus regularly noticing the staff members who are.
By broadening our perspective of the situation, we can see the big picture and take ourselves out of a negative spiral. Prompting ourselves to remember the positives increases our sense of empowerment, which in turn builds greater resilience.
How Do You Cultivate Compassion and Curiousity?
Cultivating compassion helps us to empathize with others. To have a boss lose their patience, client blame us for a miscommunication, or peer challenge one of our decisions and actively foster the habit of viewing situations through the lens of compassion uses many character strengths at our disposal. Love. Kindness. Social Intelligence. Honesty. Love of Learning. Bravery. Leaning into our strengths can help us not take behavior personally which leads to less reactive decision-making.
After a challenging situation or moment has passed, curiosity helps us to turn it into a learning opportunity. We can ask ourselves, “That was a really tough situation. What can I learn from that?” When you see challenges as invitations to curiosity, they turn from things that push us to our limits into things that propel us to greater heights.
Make Time to Play and Create
Playing and creating is an easily overlooked habit for building resilience. Unlocking inner resources, offering new ways of solving problems, and finding different approaches to tackle touch situations are just a few of the benefits of playing, creating, enjoying. By building regular periods of play and creation into our daily lives, we give ourselves better capacity for handling stress.
Similarly, celebrating and appreciating our accomplishments and those of our staff and colleagues helps us develop an attitude of gratitude that we can carry throughout our year.
We Can Influence Change
The challenges employees face can seem daunting, but we have an assortment of character strengths as resources to help us tackle hard situations. From reminding ourselves of our deeper purpose and broadening our perspective of the positive, we can choose empathy and curiosity that allows us to appreciate and enjoy our work, even in the hard moments.
Contact Strong Cincinnati to Build A Better Workplace
Today, there’s a critical need for positive workplace culture shifts that help every employee thrive, no matter the situation. To learn more and connect with other organizations using character strengths day-to-day, you can check out Strong Cincinnati. Strong Cincinnati delivers an engaging, cohort-based learning experiences that the performance and wellbeing of your employees. Connect with us here or call 513-263-2210
