Resilient Workforce, Successful Business: 5 Action Steps For Leaders – Forbes

When I first began talking to business leaders in 2012 about the importance of protecting employees from stress and burnout, all signs were pointing to an inevitable new reality: The emerging digital economy signaled an era of perpetual transformation. Forward-thinking companies were already talking about the Future of Work, focusing on the opportunity to more efficiently communicate, market, and distribute to their customers leveraging digital tools. Leading edge upstarts like Uber and fast-growing businesses like Amazon held the clues: Companies, jobs, products, people—everything about work and life was evolving, and every employee from the warehouse to the C-suite was going to need new ways to understand and adapt to change.

As a subject matter expert on wellbeing, I saw that these inevitable changes would cause stress, burnout, and uncertainty for workers in all roles—unless they were adaptive and resilient. I found in the science of resilience and cognitive behavioral therapy a structured, evidence-based approach to helping people reframe their thinking styles to cope with adversity and embrace opportunity.

Starting with initial pilot programs in 2012, digitized resilience training helped spearhead a transformation at the intersection of corporate psychology, benefits, and leadership and development training. Attention to psychological health no longer need be limited to the few employees who reached out to their EAPs. Tools for personal improvement could now be offered to an entire employee population, not just senior executives and so-called “high potentials.”

Ten years later we are at another turning point. The pandemic made it clear that resilience is the #1 power skill—the key indicator for personal wellbeing, professional success, and for life success in general. The Future of Work and the new digital economy has made proactive mental wellbeing an imperative for success in the new workplace. Just as prevention became key to the practice of medicine, we now must see psychological training as crucial. It effectively immunizes people from the challenges of work and life by building human skills that engender emotional and mental wellbeing and a new understanding of purpose. The proof points: 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 burn out, 47% less likely to quit in high strain situations, and report good health 500% more than people testing low in resilience.

Employers are currently losing $200B in productivity on depression alone—and we have a surge of mental health issues impacting people. New data about how workers are reacting to hybrid work shows that without the skill sets to navigate new flexibility, autonomy and different work constructs, people can’t cope. Deloitte reports that 91% of 1000 employees surveyed say that unmanageable stress or frustration impacts the quality of their work, 69% express burnout when working from home, likely due to working longer hours and with less structure, and 83% say burnout can negatively impact personal relationships. Younger workers are doubly affected by mental health issues, including loneliness, and we see higher attribution in this group. Managers now bear additional burdens of keeping tabs on their teams while they, too, are stretched as they pick up the slack from the Great Resignation. They need stress management support as well as training and upskilling to model empathy, positivity, and listening skills.

All of this creates a storm of issues that are harmful to business transformation and the ability to keep pace in today’s world. We all know that when people don’t feel good, their work suffers; now we know that when their work situation isn’t good they suffer. That impacts the business.

Addressing this current environment warrants a more proactive, pronounced, and structured approach to preventively addressing burnout, stress, and spiraling risks, to help all of the workforce, so they can help the business. And while everyone rightly rushes to address the epidemic of mental health, we have to remember that mental health clinicians are a scarce resource. So many employees are not getting the care they need in a timely manner, and many others are held back by stigma and inconvenience.

To do this the right way, businesses need nothing short of a root cause, integrated approach to protecting and preparing people with the skills to adapt, be agile, be focused yet flexible, and self-confident. In a word, resilient. Adopted as a cultural practice, resilience allows people to more readily adapt to change and support them in optimizing and maximizing their situational potential.

Here are five principles for how the model of supporting the workforce has to change based on the spiraling forces impacting emotional, mental wellbeing, employee engagement and the overall employee experience:

1. Strategies need to address 100% of the population. It takes a lot more to help a workforce be resilient than just training the least resilient people.
2. Managers need support and training to reinforce resilience to create high-functioning teams.
3. Organizations must target strategic sub-populations (by geographic area, job role, and more) at scale to remediate identified risk and support growth opportunities.
4. Actionable data, in the form of workforce insights, is essential to knowing where to start, to evaluating success, and to having affecting change.
5. Leaders must adopt an approach that seeks to build stronger workforce potential and workplace cultures through mental, emotional wellbeing and adaptive capacity, as opposed to offering optional benefits that support individual wellbeing. Companies that have measurably high resilience see it in their business outcomes: their share price outpaces the Dow Jones Industrial Average by 116%. They also have less turnover, lower absence rates, and higher eNPS scores.

Ten years ago, expanding the definition of wellbeing to include emotional and mental health was groundbreaking. But today as we move out of the pandemic, businesses and leaders face a changing frontier. The work we need to do in 2022 to both recover from the last 24 months, and also to prepare ourselves for the future, needs nothing less than a primary, widespread, head-first approach to developing resilience: in our self-care, in our workforces, in our businesses and in our culture as a whole.

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