Personal Resilience Vs Workplace Resilience...
29 January 2025
Why Both Are Important to Your Business... Business struggles are making the headlines, bringing the concept of resilience to the forefront. Financial, mental, and physical resilience play a role in an individual’s and a business’s ability to overcome hurdles and setbacks. During this blog, we’ll explore the concept of personal and workplace resilience and the benefits of creating a resilient workforce.
What is Personal Resilience?
When considering personal resilience, we must look at the whole person - at home and at work. What’s happening in an employee’s personal life can affect how resilient they are in the workplace, so when we explore how to boost employee resilience, we’ll provide a holistic strategy.
To be resilient, in the most basic terms, means to be able to withstand changes that come your way. Personal resilience, therefore, includes our ability to handle stress at home, changes in financial circumstances and periods of ill health. Your employees will bring elements of what’s happening in their personal lives to work with them, impacting overall workplace resilience.
Personal resilience in the workplace considers an employee's ability to adapt and recover, whether from setbacks, rejection, or poor feedback. Understandably, an employee will feel disappointed in these situations and may need some time to process. Their resilience is measured by their ability to bounce back, to take the feedback onboard and use it to improve.
Other examples of personal resilience in the workplace include:
- Ability to adapt to change.
- Ability to handle moving goals and targets.
- Using reason and rationale to solve problems effectively.
- Learning new skills and tech.
- Being collaborative.
- Bringing a positive attitude to challenging situations.
What is Workplace Resilience?
A resilient business can weather an uncertain and changing economic landscape, much like what we’re currently experiencing. Labour and skills shortages impact productivity, and the rise in NIC and the National Minimum Wage impact your bottom line. Being financially resilient is vital in today’s challenging times.
Workplace resilience is less about the business itself but is an expansion of personal resilience. If employee resilience is low, workplace resilience will also be poor. The more resilient employees in your organisation, capable of adapting to change and facing challenges, the higher your workplace resilience will be. Resilient employees are less stressed, reducing the risk of burnout. They’re healthier - reducing absenteeism - and less concerned about personal finances, enabling them to fully commit to being productive.
Why is Resilience Important in the Workplace?
Reading our explanations on personal and workplace resilience makes it clear why resilience is essential in the workplace. Resilient employees help your business thrive, reducing costly absenteeism overheads.
Without a resilient workforce, you’re more likely to experience:
- Frequent workplace conflicts.
- High absenteeism.
- Poor employee engagement.
- Low employee retention rates.
This list is just the tip of the iceberg; the vital thing to understand is that every example given negatively impacts your business financially. Given the cost increases employers face, losing more money due to poor employee resilience isn’t something all organisations will be resilient enough to withstand.
How to Measure Resilience in the Workplace
It's essential to understand how resilient your workforce is, especially if you’re planning any significant changes. Big changes + low workplace resilience = long-term and potentially detrimental impact.
There are many different elements to pull together when measuring employee resilience. Here are some steps to follow when measuring resilience in the workplace.
Assess the Individual
Personal resilience impacts workplace resilience, so looking at each employee is a vital part of the process. You can achieve this using a self-assessment questionnaire that rates answers on a resilience scale. The Brief Resilience Scale (BRS) and Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) are effective in measuring personal perception and ability to handle adverse, stressful situations.
Managers should also take note of how their teams react to the challenges that they face daily, such as setbacks and poor feedback. Peer-to-peer insight is also helpful, as employees may mask their true feelings from their manager.
Assess the Team
After performing individual assessments, you should focus on each team or department within your business. Consider the following:
- How well do individuals in the teams work together?
- Whether teams work in siloes.
- Are teams supportive of one another?
- Assess collaboration, problem-solving, and agility.
- Do teams communicate well, both within the team and with others?
Assessing the teams will help you measure resilience but will also reveal whether there are working practices that need improvement.
Assess the Business
When measuring resilience in the business, you need to go from bottom to top and top to bottom. Are your leaders demonstrating resilience? How do they handle stress and change? Do they lead by example when nurturing a culture of open communication?
Reviewing working practices is essential because they could negatively impact workplace resilience. Pay particular attention to the policies you have in place to govern change and transition. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) will help you understand how change impacts productivity.
How to Build Resilience in the Workplace
Resilience in the workplace matters. Whether you’ve measured your workplace resilience and found it lacking or want to do more to enhance employee wellbeing, we’ll take you through the steps to follow to improve them both.
Review the Data
Once you’ve completed the assessment process, you must review the feedback and data. This information will form your workplace resilience blueprint, showing the specific areas that require improvement. Build your resilience-boosting strategy, focusing on one area at a time.
Professional Development
Professional development isn’t just about giving employees the skills to progress to the next stage in their careers. Soft skills are crucial in business, and many employers feel Gen Z employees, in particular, are lacking in them.
If your individual and team assessments show that poor communication and collaboration are negatively impacting development, invest in workshops that focus on improving these areas. Prioritise middle managers and leaders, too. Many employees move up the ladder because they’re good at the job but aren’t taught how to be effective people managers.
Create a Culture of Wellbeing
When you embed employee wellbeing into the heart of what you do, you’ll enhance personal and workplace resilience. Giving employees the tools and support they need to be mentally, physically, and financially resilient at home - their personal resilience - will feed into your overall workplace resilience.
Boost Mental Wellbeing
Dive into our blog, ‘Give your people more... mental resilience’, to understand how to measure and improve mental resilience. The mind and body are connected, so the road to boosting mental wellbeing is holistic.
Let’s break down the key elements:
- Work-life balance: Work-life balance is essential to boosting mental wellbeing. Flexible working policies are vital to supporting balance, and employees should also be taught how and encouraged to create boundaries, especially if working remotely or at home.
- Annual leave purchase scheme: An Annual Leave Purchase Scheme allows employees to purchase additional holidays beyond their contracted allowance. This popular employee benefit enhances emotional and mental wellbeing, while saving your business money.
- Mental health support: Our Employee Assistance Programme gives employees access to an app full of self-help tips as well as BACP-accredited counsellors, 24/7, 365 days a year.
Enhance Physical Wellbeing
As we’ve mentioned - the mind and body are connected. In our blog, ‘Reduce Employee Stress with Physical Wellbeing Benefits’, we examine the connection between physical activity and reducing stress. Managing stress is a factor in employee resilience, but physical health also matters.
Getting employees the medical support they need quickly makes a significant difference in how long it can take them to recover from illness. The NHS is under immense pressure, and employees can wait weeks to book a non-urgent GP appointment. Embedding a digital healthcare platform like Online GP helps employees get same-day access to health practitioners.
Support Financial Wellbeing
In our blog, ‘How to Improve Employee Financial Resilience’, we cover financial education and salary-stretching employee benefits in depth, drawing on our exclusive Money Mastery research.
When you make life more affordable for your employees, consolidate their debts, prevent them from maxing out credit cards, and help them plan for the future, you bring more joy and security to their lives.
As we cover financial resilience in the blog mentioned above, we’ll focus on employee benefits that can make a significant difference below:
- Employee Discount Schemes: When you can make everyday living more affordable, you’re alleviating their burden and helping employees become more financially resilient. Our Employee Discounts Platform gives your people up to 20% off everything from their weekly shop to a family holiday.
- Everyday Cashback: Our Virtual Pluxee Card is another solution for reducing the cost of living and enhancing employee resilience by allowing them to earn up to 15% cashback with over 80 UK retailers.
Enhance Personal and Workplace Resilience with Pluxee UK
We agree that helping employees enhance their personal resilience positively feeds into workplace resilience, which is great for your business. As we’ve explored during this blog, creating resilient employees goes beyond offering the right employee benefits. They’re a vital part of the process, and you should include them in your resilience-boosting strategy. However, you need to create the right culture to maximise their impact.
At Pluxee UK, we want to make work not just a place to be but a place to belong, sharing insights to help you navigate this journey and centralising our range of employee benefits in an all-in-one platform to streamline your processes and create an engaging user experience.
Are you ready to become resilient?
