Resilience at work: why it’s not about the individual but the team
One in five people are lonely at work. If you stop for a moment and think about it, that is a lot of people. And apparently, much of this unhappiness might be down to managers, with as much as 70% of the variance in team engagement being because of their behaviour. Be a better manager. It’s easy to say, isn’t it? But managers themselves are often stressed, angry and lonely too. So, what can we do? Could it be that improving our resilience would make a difference?
Rethinking resilience
We recently listened to a brilliant Company Doctor podcast ‘Resilience doesn’t equal brilliance: building fortitude’ and it got us thinking. When we think about resilience we tend to think of individuals bouncing back from adversity or athletes pushing themselves to the limit. According to the author and culture coach, Bruce Daisley, however, this is plain wrong. Instead, he says resilience is what we get from feeling supported by the people around us – being uplifted by the strength of the community we're in. And that means in our working lives, we should be thinking about how we create a resilient team. How do we make people feel uplifted, supported and understood by those around them?
Tips for building resilience in teams
· Co-ordinate your office time. With the push for people to come back into the office, there are stories everywhere of people going in to find they’re sitting on video calls all day with colleagues who are at home. A wasted opportunity if ever there was one, as it shouldn’t ever be about how much time you spend in the office but what you do when you’re there. Bruce Daisley’s suggestion, which we think is a nice one, is to make one day a week meeting free. On that day, you’re all in the office, but no-one except you is allowed to put stuff in your diary. It means everyone is free for a quick huddle round the desk or to have a chat over coffee. According to Bruce, who’s seen it in action in lots of workplaces, this change alone leads to better productivity, motivation and engagement because people feel less stressed. It also provides some much-needed face-to-face social interaction to combat any potential loneliness.
· Audit your meetings. We apparently have double the number of meetings now than we did before the pandemic. But how productive and useful are all these meetings? Get your team to note how many meetings they have, whether they said anything in that meeting, whether they felt it was necessary or whether it would have been better to get a summary of what it had been about. You might find the results are revealing and that you can cut down your number of meetings without any reduction in productivity at all.
· Examine your working practices. A good way to build resilience within Internal Comms is to ensure the foundations of the team's working practices are in place. This means spending time crafting the purpose and remit for internal communication in your organisation, crafting an IC strategy with direct and tangible links to business goals and outcomes and creating a clear communication channel matrix. The benefit of this is that your team will understand their working boundaries, what they're working on or towards and what their focus should (and shouldn't) be. This in turn will give them greater resilience when they’re faced with competing and multiple demands from different departments.
· Build your networks – and encourage your team to do so too. This is important on two levels. First, at the individual level, having the support of colleagues, managers, mentors, or friends helps all of us cope with challenges. It’s also a crucial part of an Internal Comms person’s role. By cultivating relationships with key stakeholders, like department heads, project managers and HR, you’ll get diverse perspectives and advice, making you better equipped to handle the complexities of internal communications. And during periods of change this can be particularly useful, as the knowledge you’ll gain from your networks will allow you to anticipate the questions and concerns of employees, provide timely updates and mitigate misinformation.
Resilient teams rely on members who are connected, aware, active and engaged. And what happens to be the best way to ensure that’s what they are? Why (and we say this with big smiles on our faces), it’s good internal communication, of course. If you need support with your internal comms, give us a call - we’d love to chat.
