Table of Contents
What our Resilience Data is telling us
Below is a high level summary of what we believe you as our clients should know and might be able to use to support your people and build Resilience into your organisation.
1. Changes over Time: Motivated but Burned
The good news: since 2011 more people score highly on “my job is highly motivating at present” This tells us that your people are capable and engaged in the challenges you set them. However, this has come at a cost.
Scores for the following questions have decreased:
− All aspects of my life are aligned with my highest values (spirit)
− My mind is clear and focused (mind)
− My communication is clear and positive (mind)
− I stick to a healthy nutritious diet (body)
− I enjoy an unbroken, deep sleep of at least 7 hours (body)
And scores for “I worry about the future” (withdrawn) have increased.
The message is clear, people are more engaged in their work and programmes to help drive engagement are working. However, the associated message is that your colleagues are not managing and growing their resilience levels in step with their work effort. While they are working hard and are engaged, there is likely a measurable cost to body, heart, mind and spirit.
The question for you is how sustainable is this work style and engagement before these factors undermine your efforts?
2. Foundations of Individual Resilience
We looked at the range of resilience ratios – a measure of assets to liabilities in our resilience model. High resilience ratios indicate high levels of resilience. The following factors drive higher ratios:
− My mind is clear and focused (mind)
− I make decisions with confidence and clarity (mind)
− I am contented, joyous and fulfilled (spirit)
− I recover quickly from sustained stress (stress mastery)
− I enjoy vibrant good health and high energy (body)
Interestingly (and unfortunately) the first on the list in indicating higher resilience – clear and focused mind – is also one of the key declining scores over time. The data also shows us that Energise Body factors (exercise, sleep, nutrition and daily discipline) most strongly drive increasing resilience ratios. Spirit in Action and Train Mind also drive high ratios. If you recall your resilience training, these causal factors will not be a surprise. The message seems to be that more engagement at work does not lead to more discipline in maintenance of personal factors which lead to Energise Body.
3. Resilience Sinkholes
We also looked at the low resilience ratios and found that the following factors correlate strongly with lower ratios:
− I feel sad and dejected (depressed)
− My self confidence is low (depressed)
− I am frustrated, irritable and impatient (distress)
− I am tired and fatigued by the end of the day (withdrawn)
− I worry about the future (withdrawn)
Very clearly these are all factors from the death spiral concept of how resilience fails. It also shows us that depression is the polar opposite of resilience. With data suggesting that one in five people will suffer depression, clearly we need to face this courageously.
Practically, these results show in no uncertain terms the critical importance of training your people for bounce and building a culture that responds creatively to setbacks.
4. Resilience Training
Works When analysing pre and post training diagnostics the data tells us that Resilience Training works (phew!). All assets categories show positive change lead by Spirit in Action and Energise Body. The following liability categories show good improvement: depression, distress, vulnerable and withdrawn. There is less change in confused and disengaged.
The liability factors that improve most after training:
− My mind is really active at night (distress)
− I work late to complete things (vulnerable)
− I worry about the future (withdrawn)
− I wake up early and can’t get back to sleep (depressed)
− I feel stress in my stomach, chest, skin or shoulders (distress) − My self confidence is low (depressed)
− I am tired and fatigued by the end of the day (vulnerable)
− It takes a while for me to calm down after conflict (master stress)
− I consume more sugar, fast food or alcohol when stressed (vulnerable)
Training in Bounce and Stress Mastery modules are primary factors in helping people bounce back from adversity and focus on more important issues.
The asset factors that improve most after training:
− My work is calm, organised and easily manageable (master stress)
− I stick to a healthy nutritious diet (energise body)
− I am well tuned to signs and feelings of stress (master stress)
− I enjoy an unbroken, deep sleep of at least 7 hours (energise body)
− I take at least 10 minutes to relax each day (master stress)
− I have an annual health assessment (energise body)
− I exercise at least five days a week (energise body)
Clearly, our Stress mastery and Engerise Body modules have the most impact on individual questionnaire scores.
5. Global Patterns
While there are no major differences across the continents and countries, we did discover that:
a) Females have higher scores in liabilities than males – mostly in confused, distress and depressed. Males and females are similar in assets.
b) There is an increase in asset scores with age. All asset categories except engage emotions show significant increases with age.
Perhaps that is a good note to end on. If resilience scores increase with age it is clearly learnable. Why not get started early and reap the benefits.
IN SUMMARY:
- Resilience Institute Training effectively improves 16 factors of resilience
- Body and mind are key factors for high levels of resilience
- Depression is a real risk to resilience
- Resilience can be learned and is increasingly critical to productivity
If you would like one of our consultants to meet with you to explore these findings in more depth please let us know. In particular we are working to deepen our own understanding of the following key areas to reinforce resilience training in pragmatic and targeted ways:
- Can organisations that have improved engagement scores for their employees leverage similar techniques and programs to improve the resilience of their employees, enabling them to cope with heightened engagement and implications for work pace and hours?
- Is there an achievable balance that can help organisations both manage and measure the balance between engagement and resilience for sustainable performance improvement – at an individual and organisation level?
- Are there tools and techniques to empower individuals to maintain and grow their resilience capabilities, and can these be made available in a costeffective and attractive way? We are working on examples from overseas and the recent acceleration in the “Measure Me” sphere to explore the practical and meaningful opportunities.
We will be using this data to enable a more strategic engagement with clients who really want to explore what sustainable high performance might look like.
What our Resilience Data is telling us… View and Download PDF
