One of the joys of our work is witnessing real time examples of how some organisations are supporting their employees’ personal resilience, as well as introducing the frameworks that make this possible on an ongoing basis. Below are two recent examples of teams who are making resilience business as usual, and the impact they are reporting.

  1. Bring on the positive! Experiencing positive emotions has been shown to improve our ability to be innovative and solution focused. Here we see it in action:

The office decided to hold the first team meeting of the week focused on, “What had gone well the previous week and why?” This approach is based on a positive psychology strategy as a pathway to enhance positive emotion and build a solution focused approach.

What was the impact? The team looks forward to the meeting, which is a great start. “We find that the team seems more connected for the rest of the day and conversations appear more positive in general.” This strategy helps not only in the meeting but perpetuates a more positive, optimistic approach for the coming week.

  1. Other research shows that regular expression of emotion, both positive and negative, supports team cohesion and effectiveness. This emotional expression doesn’t have to be complicated, as demonstrated here:

After the team had completed resilience training, they reported one outcome as finding a common language to use when people were noticing their resilience fading. It didn’t take long to test this out.

The office manager noticed that, over the course of two weeks, team members were becoming more isolated, people’s conversations were shorter and more abrupt, less time was spent together in the staff room, and people were starting to skip recovery breaks.

Action: In conjunction with the director, the office manager emailed everyone stating there was an office meeting in the staff room at 1:30pm the next day, no excuses. A conversation was held about how it had been noticed that people were becoming isolated and appearing more stressed. Everyone contributed and talked about what was going on for them, not so much the content but how they were feeling and how they were managing (all over a nice afternoon tea).

What was the impact? Team members described feeling relieved that others were feeling the same, that it felt like the ice had been broken and it got the team back as a group rather than feeling isolated. This meeting was held with a lighthearted, more humorous approach, rather than reproaching staff for behaviour, which they felt was critical to its success. The meeting concluded with the daily 5-minute quiz. Many noticed more smiling faces rather than eyes down. This would probably not have happened if the framework to enable this conversation had not been previously put in place.