Workforce Resilience is much more than just a trending buzzword. It’s about addressing your company’s greatest vulnerability; the risk to workforce well-being amidst rising rates of mental health challenges, burnout, and turnover.
We’ve all been through one traumatic life experience after another for over two years now. Workers everywhere are feeling unprecedented levels of stress, burnout, and uncertainty. There’s no escaping these risks, but those who are adaptive and resilient are better equipped to weather the storm.
Every employee from the warehouse to the C-suite needs new ways to adapt quickly. This is driving mass adoption of the word “resilience,” and many overuse the word to the point of losing its meaning in a post-pandemic reality. It’s become everything from a beacon of hope to a call for greater productivity. But what do people mean when they use this term? Resilience isn’t just a buzzword. Resilience is an essential (and learnable) skill, critical for the mental well-being of our modern workforce, and utterly core to meQuilibrium as a company.
From the Latin for “to leap back,” resilience is the ability to quickly recover from adversity, as well as the capability to navigate difficult day-to-day conditions and to thrive, not just survive, in the face of ongoing challenges. For the past decade, meQuilibrium has emphasized resilience as the human ability to manage adversity, bounce back from setbacks, and make the most of work and life.
Here’s how we define resilience for the modern workforce:
Resilience is a skill.
The pandemic made it clear, resilience is the #1 power skill—the key indicator for personal well-being, professional success, and for life success in general. Resilience skill building is a structured, evidence-based approach to helping people reframe their thinking styles to cope with adversity and embrace opportunity. We’ve personalized resilience building to develop positive behaviors that deliver measurable improvements in mental well-being, stress management, and engagement at work.
Resilience is essential for managers and leaders to support their teams.
The ability of managers and leaders to model and mentor the principles of resilience helps build high-performing teams. Resilience training empowers managers with the ability to use data-driven, actionable insights that show their team risks in real-time so they can take action.
Resilience is measurable.
Your strategy for helping your people has to be measurable. You need data that allows you to visually pinpoint workforce burnout risk, both overall and via key component scores like low motivation, negative outlook, and work overload, and then act on these insights. Comparing data to industry benchmarks based on unique data points can give context to your organization’s data.
Resilience is a system.
Workforce resilience requires a holistic system that incorporates readiness, risk detection, cultural commitment, and analytics to improve sustainable performance across 100% of the population. People with greater resilience are 300% more likely to develop a positive sense of purpose in what they do, they are 60% less likely to succumb to burnout, 47% less likely to quit in high strain situations, and report good health 500% more than people with low resilience.
Resilience is scalable.
We’ve cultivated an award-winning system that’s scalable to help individuals, teams, and organizations. We provide a comprehensive collection of behavior change skills, activities, and training materials that can be targeted to strategic sub-populations based on geographic location, job role, and line of business to support growth. With these insights, you can deliver targeted campaigns focused on Empathy, Work/life balance, Burnout, Change-readiness, Growth Mindset, and Purpose.
So yes, resilience is a modern-day survival skill at the individual level, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a way to build better managers, better teams, and ultimately a more agile organization. At meQuilibrium, we harness the science of resilience, AI, predictive analytics, and neuroscience to help businesses build workforce well-being and potential by ensuring it’s more than a catchy term. Because we understand defining resilience doesn’t end with the idea that it’s a learnable skill for individuals, we’re excited about our recent launch of the Workforce Resilience Suite.
“Today, taking a proactive organization-wide approach to mental well-being is the new essential for maintaining a powerful, agile and engaged workforce—one that can take care of themselves and their customers,” says Jan Bruce, meQuilibrium CEO. “Employers must engage every individual, help managers build engaged teams, and drive the culture in a coordinated way.”
Resilience is a learnable and scalable skill set; for the mental well-being of the modern workforce, both are key to building an agile organization. Learn how meQuilibrium partners with top employers to build workforce resilience in our latest report, Business Resilience Arrives: The Well-being Market Matures.
