Resilience Skills

 

  • During the COVID pandemic, burnout and a lack of connection were high among an organizational team.

    The training I developed was a team training in resilience skills for a remotely distributed workforce.

  • See overall team resilience and workplace performance increase through connection to the organization's core operationalized values.

    Resilience is rated through weekly check-ins and employee surveys utilizing Likert scales that are conducted during quarterly performance check-ins.

    To meet this goal, the team needs:

    • Buy in (during a time of stress/depletion, to feel motivated to take on learning resilience skills).

    • Discussion with each team member to see where they felt life/job performance was lacking, and what they wish was different, paved the way for seeing opportunities for improvement.

    • Awareness that when burnout is high, resistance is also going to be high, and that this is an internally "false narrative".

  • Creation of practice activities:

    • Review of the organization's operationalized values, as a team, with opportunities for the team to offer additional feedback on specific behaviors that support the organization's values, as well as those "slippery" behaviors that destabilize those values.

    • Tying it to the personal: how do the organization's 5 different values tie into your personal life, outside of work? How is your life better when you utilize these values? How is life worse?

    Knowledge/Information awareness:

    • There are certain "triggers" for each individual, where they will be less likely to want to use values (e.g., not getting enough sleep). Knowledge awareness of these triggers can set the stage for not spiraling when triggered.

  • Training was delivered via first giving stakeholders training in active listening and asking open-ended questions, as well as prompts for the management to transparently share some of their own struggles with resilience.

    The team decided to have a once weekly check-in on personal and professional goals for that week; to rate how they were doing on a red-yellow-green scale (red = not well, yellow = okay, green = great); to check in on the organization's values and share which they were honoring well and which needed more attention.

  • How we evaluate the success of this training:

    A member of the team is showing development of greater resilience when they share that they are having a hard time, and are trying to "right the ship" or get realigned with the values. This ability to be self-aware around the spaces where someone is out of alignment with their values is an important first step. This would be mentioned in one-on-one reviews with the manager as part of the manager's inquiry into how the team member is staying resourced and avoiding burnout.

    As the skill of resilience is developing further, we see more proactive behaviors around not letting "triggers" that could derail the person even get started--going to bed on time, getting time for exercise, logging off of email, etc., start to become more frequent. These would be mentioned as part of team check-ins.

    Additional work: the person is able to analyze their own patterns and differentiate between a critical internal voice that is fear-driven/stress-driven, and the "real" voice within that is tired, overwhelmed, has a need that should be met, and the team member prioritizes meeting needs over operating on auto-pilot.

    Additional evaluation: "5" or higher ratings on Likert scales during employee performance reviews.

    Results: 98% employee satisfaction, overall.