How’s your workplace resilience?
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What Are HR Professionals Saying?
You’ve told us a lot about how work is going. You work so hard to ensure the organization keeps going. That people have the support they want when they need it. You’re a kind of ‘internal’ frontline helping professional. This means you’re helping others at their best and at their worst and most challenging times. You’re supporting people that are really different and sometimes clashing in terms of roles, values, perspectives and generations. You see leaders and teams in your organization aren’t always equipped to manage this complexity and it’s impacting them at work. The complexity you’re navigating isn’t always fully appreciated and the truth is, it’s impacting you too.
What is Workplace Resilience?
At the heart of workplace resilience is the mindsets, skills and support that help people cope through challenges and bounce back from them. One of the greatest challenges we’re facing is rapidly increasing complexity. We know workplace resilience is waning because 77% of the workplace is disengaged. It’s a sign we’re not coping through or bouncing back very well. It means your people are just getting by. It’s costing you the ability to solve persistent and emerging problems in a time when everything is changing faster than ever before.
%
disengagement in the workforce
What’s Impacting Workplace Resilience?
Workplace resilience is impacted by workplaces with high risk of psychological injury. The qualities of psychologically high risk environments include:
Significant mismatch between leader and frontline perspectives
Toxic Culture (harassment, silencing, bullying, exclusion)
Trauma (Experiencing events with loss of choice, control and helplessness at work)
Polycrisis (Intersection of multiple crises at work and world)
Increasing workplace complexity
Rapid Technology Change
Low Psychological Safety
Helping or caring work is undervalued and underfunded
Workplace psychological injury and related impacts can look like:
Trauma: (perpetual fight, flight or freeze responses)
Burnout (too much, for too long with too few resources)
Vicarious trauma (being aware of the suffering of others creates trauma responses)
Compassion Fatigue (inability to care or feel compassion due to prolonged stress of helping others)
What’s the Real Cost of Lost Workplace Resilience?
Productivity. Service Delivery. Well-being. Safety. People.
The real costs cascade and compound in high-risk organizations. Before people leave, engagement, productivity, wellbeing and service delivery suffer. As high risk environments take a larger toll on people, they leave causing turnover and recruitment costs. It also creates brain drain in the organization. The bottom line is seriously affected.
Annual cost of productivity and disengagement in North America
The costs in high risk organizations expand when we consider the cost of psychological safety. The inability of staff to safely express ideas or concerns without fear of reprisal also has a very direct impact on physical safety as well.
What’s the solution?
The solution exists in equipping human resources teams and leaders with the mindsets and skills to build organizational and team resilience. The responsibility for workplace resilience can’t be left solely on the shoulders of frontline staff. Teams want this to be a shared responsibility with leaders and the organization. We’ve created the Resilience Pathways© model as a guide to build and restore organizational and staff resilience. We’re strategically supporting HR teams and Leaders to forge a new path for workplace resilience.
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How’s workplace resilience going? Here are a few tools to help you explore the state of personal and organizational workplace resilience.
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We’re here to support you on your workplace resilience journey with thoughtful strategy and training.