Workplace Resilience: Helping Good Employees Stay Clear, Focused, and Well

By Anchor Workplace Services, a division of Renewing Hope Counseling

Most employees do not leave their personal lives in the parking lot when they walk into work. They bring the argument they had with their spouse that morning, the financial stress, the grief, the anxiety, the poor sleep, the parenting problems, the care of aging parents, the relationship problems, and the various disasters left by their teenagers.

After bringing all of that to work, we give them a laptop to perform at their best.

That may not be realistic.

Workplace resilience is not about enabling employees to cope with workplace stress by being more robust. Resilience, clinically, is about adaptation in the face of stress, adversity, change, or uncertainty, and in the workplace this means supporting employees to maintain their emotional regulation, increase their cognitive flexibility, and adopt healthy ways of coping whilst having sufficient psychological resources to do their job.

And that matters to employers.

The implications of a chronically overwhelmed workforce are significant and far-reaching, including decreased concentration, diminished ability to make sound decisions, increased irritability and communication breakdowns, and increased disengagement. While an employee’s body may be present at work, their brain may have checked out for an extended period of time. This is known as presenteeism or working while ill, where an employee’s physical presence at work is compromised by their mental state.

Building a resilient workplace does not mean that all stress can be eliminated; it simply enables employees to cope with the stresses of normal work in a healthy and sustainable way and to deal with any problems or difficulties that arise before they become a crisis.

Culture Matters More Than the Motivational Poster

Even when an organization claims to value employee wellness, it often creates a culture that tries to hide employees’ work problems rather than helping them.

Employees pay attention to what leadership actually rewards.

Do you really expect employees to leave on time for lunch to recharge if they feel that others perceive them as being lazy when they do? Do you expect employees to respond to every email immediately, even when there is no real urgency? Do you expect employees to hide the fact that they are seeking help for a mental health issue and risk being seen as being unstable or even weak?

The quality of psychological health at work and high performance standards are NOT mutually exclusive. In fact, a healthy workplace would allow for high performance expectations, healthy communication, and reasonable boundaries and expect employees to function optimally with dental coverage.

Three Practical Ways to Build Workplace Resilience

1. Protect the employee’s cognitive bandwidth.

Protect the employee’s cognitive bandwidth. Limit constant interruptions, clear up unclear priorities, make sure there are not too many meetings and don’t create excessive demands on the employee.

Help them prioritize! Ask them: “What actually needs your attention today?”

Forcing prioritization to help the employee manage their tasks. Give the employee a framework to work within and help them to manage their 15 (or so) moderately important tasks, rather than treating them all as 15 emergencies.

And usually pretty good for production as well.

2. Make healthy conversations normal before there is a crisis.

But while managers aren’t therapists, they should have enough of a brain for human behavior to 1) recognize significant change in an employee’s typical functioning, and 2) have a respectful conversation about it with said employee (and possibly preparation for such a conversation).

“Looks like you haven’t been yourself lately. Is there something going on that the organization can help you work through in order to return to work fully functioning?”

Diagnosing someone or invading their privacy and asking for details of their personal life is very different from noticing that someone isn’t functioning well and asking if there is something that the workplace can do to help.

Likewise, in workplace settings, counseling and employee support services ought to be accessible and periodically recognized as normative. Failure to mention such resources until an employee breaks down may mean that scores of preventable problems could have been averted.

3. Build recovery into the culture.

We can’t stay activated indefinitely and expect to function well. So take a real break. Honor normal work hours. Use your PTO. Set boundaries around after-hours communication. Support employees to be physically active throughout the day. Build connection into your workday. Get off from your computer screen.

This is not about creating a workplace spa where nobody gets anything done.

Recovery improves performance.

An exhausted nervous system is not something to wear as a badge of honor.

Anchor Workplace Services

We help organizations strengthen the human side of their workforce at Anchor Workplace Services, a division of Renewing Hope Counseling.

Anchor Workplace Services provides organizations with a range of workplace services and resources which can be adapted to suit their needs. We offer employee counseling and support, workplace resilience training, leadership consultation, and mental health education, as well as responding to and managing workplace crises, delivering workshops, and distributing resources to help employees function well at both a personal and professional level.

We are a team of clinically trained employees and thus have much more to offer than typical wellness programs with vacuous phrases. We are familiar with stress, anxiety, depression, trauma, grief, relationships, and many more problems that affect humans at work.

Don't let that be your workplace!

Our goal is to support your employees in being their best at work and outside of work. To develop leaders who have the necessary tools to support their employees and create a culture that supports psychological health.

Because employees are not machines. And, frankly, even machines need maintenance.

Anchor Workplace Services, a division of Renewing Hope Counseling.

Anchor Workplace Services builds customized programs to strengthen workplace resilience, support employee well-being and create a healthier workplace culture.