UK 
United States
Not all pressure is bad. Yet striking the right pressure balance can often feel challenging – especially when we face another unforeseen pressure like the recent fuel shortages! These sustained pressures have depleted the health, wellbeing and resilience of our people and the knock-on effects are scary.
Resilience can help to alleviate these pressures but how do we build this up? The answer is through habits of self-care, to protect our wellbeing and mental health. Let’s discuss how we can encourage these habits amongst our people.
Consider the following four quadrants of resilience based on Stephen Covey’s renewal quadrants:
Physical: Exercise, Diet, Sleep,
Mental: Learning, Reading
Emotional: Positive relationships
Mindful: Having purpose, religion, nature
Of these four quadrants, think about how you could enhance these four areas, first for yourself and then for your people. We know it’s natural to put the wellbeing of others before our own, but this can be counterproductive. If we ourselves are not focused on our own self-care, how can we look after our people?
Why not download our worksheet: how to prioritise self-care?
We believe that by having the right performance management behaviours and practices in place we can influence the responsibility our people take for their wellbeing and encourage greater resilience as a result.
Role model the right type of behaviour
In a hybrid/remote work setting it can be even harder to have an awareness of what other’s are doing to manage their self-care. Managers should take special care to role model good behaviour and make this visible to their teams. For example, by messaging team members when they are going out for a lunch time walk or to read a book. This is not about employees feeling obliged to participate in the same activity at the same time, but encouraging others to also recharge in their own personal way. This point is highlighted by Dr Georgi Toma on The HR Uprising Podcast.
You can listen to the episode here: The Wellbeing Protocol with Georgi Toma.
Get to know your people
Whilst it is harder to influence the emotional and mindful elements of the resilience quadrant, host of the HR Uprising Podcast, Lucinda Carney, expresses the importance of getting to know our people, particularly in a remote or hybrid setting where the usual office ‘chit chat’ is far less common. Having an insight into these areas is important for our own awareness but also for our people to see that we care and can sympathise/show support to them when needed.
Communicate regularly to avoid feelings of isolation
In a combined office and home-based environment it can be a challenge to connect with our staff in the same way. Ensuring that managers are holding regularly one-to-one’s (remote or face-to-face), ideally once a month is a good idea for capturing feedback and drawing insight into how our staff are managing. Using a performance management system to capture these insights is helpful so that you can track progress and flag any concerns or issues raised in a more structured way.
For guidance, take a look at our manager’s guide: one-to-one’s and check-in’s: 7 simples steps to success.
Provide opportunities to collect feedback
In a remote or hybrid work setting, it is far harder to pick up on the subtle cues that someone is not themselves. Staff may also feel discouraged to reveal how they are feeling to their managers or another member of their team in fear of how it could be received. Consider a more formal approach to collating feedback from staff on their overall wellbeing, whether as a Pulse Survey, ideal for capturing quick feedback, or a more detailed approach, that might capture ideas from employees as to how the organisation can support employees better.
You can find out more about Actus’s 360 Feedback and Survey module and all our other modules that support a hybrid workplace via this link: find out more about Actus Software.
Prioritise learning and development
Consider enrolling staff on relevant e-learning or training programmes that give them a sense of purpose and allow them to progress within their careers. The feedback received from running our own training programmes is that people enjoyed the collaborative nature of our online courses, with the added benefit of them being far more flexible than the old style training days that people went on. Find out more about the learning solutions that we offer at Actus here.
Bounce back better
As we all continue to navigate this unknown landscape, it is important to focus on the wellbeing of ourselves but also our staff. As the CIPD states: ‘good health and wellbeing can be a core enabler of employee engagement and organisational performance’. Therefore, wellbeing and resilience should be high up on the strategic agenda for any organisation looking to bounce back better.
For more on this topic, join out upcoming webinars on the topic of wellbeing and resilience with Business Psychologist, Lucinda Carney.
