A combination of clashing forces is creating new demand for resilience in the workplace. Consider a few recent statistics:

• 66% of workers are currently feeling burnout.
• Employee engagement has fallen to 31%, the lowest it’s been in over a decade. In particular, workers younger than 35 are feeling detached from their work.
• 80% of workers experience productivity anxiety, often daily or multiple times per week.
  

Gallup connects these startling numbers to multiple forces negatively impacting the workforce. Specifically, employees are struggling to keep up with the rapid pace of change, particularly related to AI. In fact, 73% of employees reported that their organization has experienced disruptive change in the past year. 

Many employees are also reacting to fast changes to hybrid and remote work as return-to-office mandates continue across industries. At the same time, they are feeling the pressure of a higher workload, particularly driven by rising customer expectations. And they are frustrated with broken performance management systems, which do little to clarify expectations and support their development.

Further, all of this is happening against a growing backdrop of uncertainty and anxiety surrounding political and economic tensions.

Understanding resilience in the workplace

The reality is that HR likely has little control over the macro-level things that are making work increasingly difficult for employees. But there are ways to help employees address the emotional side of these challenges by building resilience, which is a part of emotional intelligence.

Note that HR teams must take care in focusing on resilience. At times, employees may interpret needing resilience as the idea that they need to simply accept what is happening, while ignoring their emotions around it. 

But resilience is about more than simply surviving adversity. Rather, resilience is the ability to navigate through adversity, to effectively adapt to change and thrive. It’s about dealing with disruptive forces while adapting with integrity in response to changing circumstances, eventually leading to the experience of thriving. 

Adaptive resilience is a skill that can be deliberately cultivated and developed in the face of chronic negative stress and constantly increasing demands, complexity and change.

Developing adaptive resilience

In our experience, successfully developing adaptive resilience requires three components:

1. Develop clarity around how the body and brain perceive threats.

Our brains are hard-wired for survival, which is why we seek the safety of stability over the unknown of change. In SIY Global’s programs, we use neuroscience to help people understand the natural physical, cognitive, and emotional reactions to difficult situations. When people become more aware of these natural responses, it becomes easier to address them.

2. Shift mindsets from resistant to expansive.

The ability to shift your mindset is critical for developing resilience at work, but it’s also a concept that many people get wrong. Many people view it like flipping a switch, i.e. “Think/feel this way, not that way.”

But mindsets are built on deeply ingrained assumptions and beliefs that influence the way we understand the world, and how we take action in it. Shifting one’s mindset requires self-reflection, and can’t be forced externally.

While you can’t make someone change their mindset, you can guide them. Some of the ways we work with people to make a mindset shift is by helping them understand where they are operating from, and the sticking points that are limiting their response to the situation. We also explore ways they can go from trying to “fix” the situation to learning from it. 

Perhaps most importantly, it’s important for people to find self-compassion in this shift, and see what they are doing well. This is critical to ensuring that they can shift into finding ways to think expansively for the future, and see how they can contribute to success ahead.

3. Build trust.

The third component of adaptive resilience is often the one that’s most overlooked: Building trust. While the first two components focused on the individual, organizational resilience depends on how teams show resilience together. 

Building trust among a team first requires empathy. In general, building self-awareness also helps to create empathy, as we recognize when others are feeling the same way.

But one of the biggest challenges when an organization is going through something difficult is that people may have very different reactions to the same situation. For example, two colleagues might have dramatically opposing responses to using AI. 

By building skill in attentive listening, we help people to build stronger empathy responses when people feel differently than they do.This also forms the basis for creating psychological safety, which is critical to how the team successfully responds together to new and difficult challenges.

Using mindfulness as a tool to support resilience

In every step of the process to build resilience at work, mindfulness can serve as a powerful tool, helping people to understand and manage their response to the situation. 

Here are a few critical things to understand about mindfulness that can be helpful when using it as part of a program to build resilience:

1. Mindfulness is simple. You don’t have to have any experience with mindfulness to get immediate benefits. Practicing mindfulness is simply about being aware. It’s paying attention to what’s going on in the mind, body and environment with an attitude of curiosity and kindness. Anyone can do it at any time.
2. The goal is to improve the flow of information in the brain. Put simply, mindfulness is about giving your brain a moment to think better and therefore choose better actions. Some parts of our brain (specifically, the limbic system) are designed to react quickly and emotionally. But other parts of the brain (the cortex) help us think rationally and reasonably. The goal of mindfulness is to improve the flow of information between these systems so that we can see clearly and act wisely.
3. Practicing mindfulness at work only takes a minute or two. One of the most common things we hear from our program participants is how much they love mindfulness micropractices, which only take one to three minutes. It’s incredibly easy to do at any time in the work day, 

When it comes to building resilience in the workplace, mindfulness is one of the simplest, most powerful tools we can use to be more effective. It functions as a safeguard to protect us from getting lost in the intensity of a situation. When we shift from obsessing about a problem to assessing our response to the problem, then we can open ourselves to possibilities and solutions. 

Resilience is the backbone of your future

No person or organization has ever succeeded without overcoming serious challenges. However, in today’s workplace, it may feel like the challenges are multiplying too rapidly to manage. 

That’s why it’s more critical than ever that HR steps in to carefully cultivate resilience. Because it’s not enough to simply tell individuals that it’s up to them to “figure it out.” Rather, you need to create a systematic, shared approach that purposefully builds resilience into the fabric of your culture.

As James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, says: “We don’t rise to the level of our intentions. We fall to the level of our systems.”

Explore Adaptive Resilience

We’re here to help you strengthen resilience across your organization. Explore our course on Adaptive Resilience, as well as our full suite of emotional intelligence programs.