Maintaining resilience post lockdown: five factors for a great plan
I’ve just read an article in my professional journal daily bulletin saying that homeworking is set to double post the pandemic. 37% of employees, for example, will now be working from home (WFH) regularly post Covid-19. This is double pre lockdown figures.
Coping with the challenges of lockdown and maintaining good mental health - having personal resilience - became really important to learn and develop whilst we were ‘on hold’ these past few months.
So as it seems many will not be ‘coming back to the office’, supporting and building resilience continues. Those who return to an office space, too, may find colleagues won’t be returning to their desk, preferring to WFH, or perhaps they have been made redundant, or died. Maintaining resilience for all remains vital as we move into the re-configured work place or space, where ever that is, physically and emotionally.
Maintaining our personal resilience
Resilience includes the ability not only to cope with great adversity, but also to learn from them and change. So says Edith Grotberg.
Grotberg was a psychologist and researched and wrote extensively as a proponent of positive psychology. She directed an international resiliency project that investigated the different factors involved in resilience in children. Some of her insights are applicable for us all as adults, because they are simple but important actions we are able to take to maintian resilience, not let things slip, as we return to more familiair and regular working situations. We can all help ourselves, but managers and leaders can also do a great deal.
Here are the five factors to a good managment and leadership reslience plan.
Five actions to help support and maintain resilience
Learning: individually and as teams or whole organisations, giving space to share learnng about resilient, how we are coping, is great practice. It acknowledges this is important and promotes peer support and learning. Asking for support is one of the pillars of resilience, so that’s a ‘double hit.’ The key will be having a great manager or leader who seeks out the learning and makes sure it is dsicussed and applied.
Listening: at every level listening matters. Edith discovered that listening to what children talked about when they shared experiences, their language and examples, gave clues as to their mental state. She identified specific statements that were deifinite pointers to young people feeling unhappy or not doing well. A great manager or leader will listen for the verbal clues and take action.
Autonomy and control: if you’ve read Dan Pink you’ll know how important these factors are for human motivation. Resilience factors include that people need to feel they have some power in a situation to meet a challenge. Maximising autonomy supports instrinsic motivation.
Trust: there are several types of trust, and lockdown, remote working and WFH have all, I hope, embedded trust as a key behavioural value amongst teams and managers. As WFH is set to continue, so is trust. Managers and leaders would do well to dsicuss the different types of trust and be open about it, ensuring there is co-working trust. Building and maintaining trust based relationships is often very hard but it offers the greatest outcomes and will help people maintain their personal resilience.
Transformation: Edith’s research concluded that resilience is about “facing, overcoming, and being strengthened or even transformed by experiences of adversity.” This final action is about using the opportunity of what has happened, difficult and challenging as it has been, to build and transform. Managers and leaders shoud be thinking about this and holding honest conversations about, as the national campaign says, building back better.
Personal reslience and wellbeing is a priority
The medical profession is predicting a wave of mental health issues, greater than when we were in full lockdown, as we experince an aftermath and potentially a second wave as well.
Mainstreaming wellbeing and resilience at work could not come soon enough.
There’s a checklist of many activities that make it possible and I am sure I haven’t listed them all here, but here’s my first attempt:
strategy and policy top to bottom (or is that bottom to top?)
1-2-1 wellbeing coaching and mentoring
peer support
cross organisation wellbeing initiatives (not side projects)
workshopping personal resilience skills for everyone who needs it
management training inlcuding the top team
social learning situations that captialise on personal experiences and problem solve
holding open and honest conversations as the norm
and …..
for it to be sufficiently resourced and led
Get in touch if you’d like some help
I’ve a host of resources and ideas to help support personal resilience at work, including tried and tested learning that can be provided f-2-f or online.
I’ve written extensively about WFH for the IOEE ‘Think Enterprise’ and it contains plenty of guidance, ideas and learning, with a link to some learning modules.