Resilience at Work

How to build resilience in your workplace

The evidence is clear that resilience training works. Our mission is to help organisations build safer, more resilient people who, in turn, form high performing, happy teams.

Creating a resilience program

It is important to get clarity around your objectives, resources, budget and time availability. What are your long term goals? How does the future look if resilience training succeeds? What does a future without training look like? It helps to consider:

• Longevity: is resilience training a one-off intervention based on specific challenges? Or do you want to build a long-term resilient culture?
• Location: can you run the training at one location or are you a distributed team?
• Budget: can you afford face-to-face training, both in terms of bringing in external expertise and taking employees away from their desks?
• Pressing concerns: are you experiencing rapid change or disruption? Are there some core competencies you would like to develop to deal with a specific issue?
• Measurement: Can you measure the impact of the program? Do you have tools to assess pre and post-training results?
• Blended learning: can a blended learning approach work within your organisation?
• Communication: how will you communicate the program? As a way to help employees weather the storm, or as a program designed to help them reach their potential?

In-house resilience training

Many organisations choose to develop an in-house resilience program. Someone will need to lead the training and gather the resources required to effectively educate the team. Sometimes trust is an issue, especially if the intervention is seen as a way of pushing employees to do more with less.

It will be important to agree on a definition of resilience and a clear set of objectives for the program. Is it to equip employees with coping skills or how to deal with stressful events? Is the program based in science or philosophy? Do you cover lifestyle, emotional intelligence and high performance?

A good option may be to train an internal champion who can then confidently run workshops using a learning framework that suits your organisational needs.

Finding a resilience training vendor

In many cases, it makes sense to enlist the services of a qualified vendor. They will have the skills and experience to run a comprehensive program, especially at scale. There are many options when it comes to choosing a resilience training partner:

• Coaches who provide one-on-one sessions with your team members
• Training companies specialising in health and wellbeing
• Specialist training organisations who focus on resilience only
• Digital solutions that train resilience online or via apps

It can be tricky selecting the appropriate option for your team. Sustainability is the key and many providers fail to make a lasting impact. One-off training sessions can be effective but the secret to resilience is deliberate practice and reminders. Ask potential training providers:

• Is your framework evidence-based?
• Do you offer a robust assessment?
• How do you keep the program alive?
• Do you offer blended solutions?
• Are your digital services GDPR compliant?
• How experienced are your facilitators?
• Do you have the capability to run virtual sessions?

If you have any questions about resilience training at work, our team will be happy to help.

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