Why resilience? Humm? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a quarter of all employees now think their job is the biggest stressor in their lives. The World Health Organization describes stress as “the global health problem of the 21st century.” Today, many of us work in a constantly connected, always on-the-go, highly demanding work culture in which stress and the risk of burnout are prevalent. With the pace and intensity of modern work culture unlikely to change, building the resilience and skills to manage work life is more important than ever effectively.
Co-founders of Google, eBay, J. Morgan Chase, and the learning solutions company Wisdom Labs find that the most resilient individuals and teams learn from those who fail rather than those who never fail. I’ve seen it many times. It, and prosper. Taking a serious challenge at times is part of what makes resilience as a skill set possible.
More than 50 years of research show that resilience is built through attitudes, behaviors, and social supports that everyone can adopt and nurture. Factors that lead to resilience include optimism. The ability to maintain balance and manage solid and difficult emotions. A sense of security and a fulfilling social support system. The good news is that you can learn to be more resilient, as many specific behaviors and skills are associated with resilience.
Build Resilience: Bring Your Best Self to Work
But building resilience skills in modern work doesn’t happen in isolation. Understanding and managing some factors that make people feel overwhelmed and stressed at work is essential. Our current workplace culture directly reflects the increasing complexity and demands facing organizations worldwide. A study by the IBM Institute for Business Value in late 2015, which surveyed 5,247 business executives in 21 industries in more than 70 countries, found that companies’ speed” was reported to be accelerating. The landscape is increasingly disrupted by technology and radically different business models.
As a result, hectic work can take place. Anytime, anywhere, the hyper-connected and responsive job can be highly stressful. In the 2014 Global Human Capital Trends survey conducted by Deloitte, 57% of respondents said their organization was “weak” in helping executives manage challenging schedules and employees manage the flow of information. ” This challenge is necessary to correct as soon as possible.
Stress and burnout associated with the increased speed and intensity of work are growing worldwide. A survey of more than 100,000 employees in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas found that assistance programs in 2014 reduced employee depression, stress, and anxiety from 55.2% in 2012. they are increased to account for 82.6% of all emotional health incidents in employees.
A recent large-scale longitudinal study of more than 1.5 million employees in 4,500 companies in 185 countries, conducted as part of the Global Corporate Challenge, found that approximately 75% of employees had moderate to high levels of I know you are experiencing stress. % of employees report severe or extreme stress at work, and another 39% say medium pressure. Current and rising stress levels in the workplace should be cause for concern, as there is a direct and negative link between negative stress, well-being, and productivity.
A significant difference is that not all stress is the same, and there are even types of stress that positively impact health and productivity. What is known as “good stress” or “eudaimonic stress” (derived from the Greek “eudaimonia” or to thrive) is that a type of stress makes us healthier, motivates us to do our best, and shows that we can stay healthy. It helps you achieve peak performance. It is convenient to think of stress as distributed on a bell-shaped curve. Once stress motivates us past its peak or peak performance, we experience the unhealthy effects of stress, which, if sustained for a period of time, can lead to burnout and chronic illness.
Stress that causes us hardships and unhealthy burdens is a significant cause of concern because it directly and negatively impacts our personal and business success. For example, in a Global Corporate Challenge study of over 1.5 million employees worldwide over 12 years, 63% of highly stressed employees reported above-average productivity and feeling less stressed. We found that it jumped to 87% for employees who did not. Jeez. In the same study, 77% of highly stressed employees reported above-average fatigue and early warning signs of long-term burnout. Burnout is a lagging indicator of chronic stress.
So how can we build resilience and stay motivated in the face of chronic negative stress, increasing demands, complexity, and change? Here are some of the latest neuroscience, behavioral, and organizational research.
Build Resilience: Practice Mindfulness
People in the business world are paying more attention to mindfulness training practices, and for a good reason. For example, social psychologists Laura Kiken and Natalie Shook found that mindfulness predicts judgmental accuracy and insightful problem-solving. Cognitive neuroscientists Peter Malinowski and Adam Moore found that mindfulness improves cognitive flexibility.
Organizational psychologists Erik Dane and Bradley Brummel found that in dynamic work environments, mindfulness enhances job performance, even when considering all three dimensions of work engagement: power, dedication, and immersion. Preventive medicine researcher Kimberly Aitken and her colleagues find that online mindfulness programs are practical and effective in reducing employee stress and improving resilience and engagement at work. I have found that it has been proven that.
How can you or your team start bringing mindfulness into the rhythms and routines of your daily work? At Wisdom Labs, we’ve found that implementing multimodal learning and skill development solutions — including mobile learning, onsite training, webinars, and peer-to-peer learning networks, promotes the most excellent chance for mindfulness to become a core competency within an organization.
Participants report statistically significant improvements in resilience and say that mindfulness tools and content delivered in these ways are handy for managing stress, improving collaboration, and enhancing well-being. Integrating mindfulness into core talent processes such as onboarding, manager training, performance conversations, and leadership development is also critical, though most organizations are not yet at this adoption stage. Finally, several books and apps also offer structured approaches to mindfulness, including the book Fully Present: The Art, Science, and Practice of Mindfulness and Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World.
Build Resilience: Share the Cognitive Load
According to Sean Aker, co-founder of the Institute for Applied Positive Research and author of The Happiness Advantage, we receive 11 million bits of information every second. Still, the brain’s executive thinking center says he receives 40 bits of information. It can only be effectively treated. A practical way to think about this is that while we can’t reduce the amount of information we receive (like our inbox), we can classify cognitive tasks to optimize how we process this information.
Categorize different types of work activities, such as emails, strategy or brainstorming sessions, and regular meetings. Considering that a recent study published by the American Psychological Association found that switching from one type of task to another makes it harder to block distractions and reduces productivity by up to 40%.
Spend time on certain work-related activities throughout the day and less time on others. While this approach may be overly disciplined for some, it is the optimal choice for effectively processing information and making quality decisions while reducing cognitive load and strain.
Build Resilience: Give Each Other a Break
Throughout the day, we must pay attention to the ebb and flow of energy and productivity we all experience. This is what health psychologists call ultradian (hourly) and circadian (daily) rhythms. The mental focus, clarity, and energy cycle typically lasts 90-120 minutes.
So it makes sense to reset your energy and consciousness a few minutes away from work. Evidence for this approach can be found in his career by Anders Ericsson, who found that a violin virtuoso has a well-defined practice time of no more than 90 minutes for him, with rest in between. Studies show that balancing work activities and short periods away from those activities promotes more energy, mental clarity, creativity and focus, and ultimately recovery at work. Power is strengthened. The long-term benefits are saving energy and preventing burnout for days, weeks, and months.
Build Resilience: Develop Mental Agility
It takes minimal effort to literally switch the neural network you use to process stressful experiences instead of reacting to difficult situations and people. This quality of mental alertness depends on your ability to mentally “decentralize” to manage your stressors effectively. “Decentralizing” stress is not about denying or suppressing the fact that you are stressed but about stopping, observing your experience from a neutral perspective, and trying to solve the problem.
Being able to detach from experience and label thoughts and emotions effectively cognitively diverts attention from the narrative networks in the brain to the more observant part of the brain. Psychologist Linda Graham enables a core resilience skill called ‘responsiveness’ by being mentally alert and unfocused when stress strikes. describes it as “the ability to pause, step back, reflect, change perspective, create options, and choose wisely.” “I will explain. For example, we often tell angry children to “use your words.” Still, it turns out that stopping and labeling emotions activate the brain’s thinking center rather than the emotional center.
Build Resilience: Develop Compassion
One of the most overlooked aspects of resilience skills is the ability to develop both self-compassion and compassion for others. According to research cited by the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, compassion boosts positive emotions, builds positive working relationships, and promotes cooperation and collaboration.
Compassion training programs, such as those offered by the Center for Compassion, Altruism, and Education and Research (CCARE) at Stanford University, have shown that practices that foster compassion increase happiness and well-being and reduce stress. Compassion and business effectiveness are not mutually exclusive. Instead, the success of individuals, teams, and organizations depends on a caring work culture.
In conclusion, we can conclude that a broad range of skills and behaviors that enable resilience in the workplace represents an excellent return on investment. A 2014 study published by PwC found that initiatives and programs that promote a resilient and mentally healthy workplace can reduce spending Returned by $2.30 per dollar.
The ability to build resilience is a valuable skill in the increasingly stressful world of work. And businesses will benefit from a more resilient workforce. Creating an organizational culture that encourages and supports resilience training makes excellent business sense.
We hope that reading this article was useful. You can also read the “How to Overcome Overwhelming Feelings?” article to complete your information.