Resilience for teams

What is resilience?

Resilience is the ability to adapt or “bounce back” from challenges. The goal of resilience is to reduce the negative impact of stress on one’s well-being. This can improve how one functions at work and beyond.    

Personal resilience can be impacted by genetics, family history, personal experience, learned behaviour, and state of health. A person's level of resilience helps them to withstand everyday workplace stressors and serious incidents. Resilience can prevent psychological harm. Importantly, resilience is a skill that can be learned.

Difficult situations and challenges are bound to happen at work. These difficulties can cause conflict, low morale, loss of productivity or health problems. Work resilience is when employees and teams manage work stress and challenges well. 

Resilience, or the ability to withstand and recover from adversity, used to be seen a personal trait. Evidence shows that building resilience in work teams can help protect psychological safety at work.

What might impact your team's resilience?

Assessing what might impact your team’s resilience can help identify areas of strength as well as areas for improvement.

Explore the questions below on your own or with your team:

• Are there changes happening that affect the team? These could be changes in management, technology or work processes. What’s the potential impact?
  
  • Helping employees manage change can help you reduce stress related to changes.
• Do each of the team members feel supported to do their best work each day? If not, why not?
  • Supporting employee success is a tool that can help you help each employee.
  • Psychologically safe orientation strategies has help for those whose position, role or job has changed. 
• What's the level of civility and respect among team members? What might be contributing to this – positively or negatively?
  • Putting civility and respect on the agenda has materials to engage your team in a discussion about this topic.
  • Team agreement process is used in collaboration with team members. This is to develop an agreement about how they’ll interact at work. It’s intended to support a high-functioning, inclusive and psychologically safe team.
• When things get difficult can team members count on each other? If so, how, and if not, why not?
  • Psychologically safe interactions helps your team support each other and avoid misunderstandings.
  • Conversation starters for psychological health and safety explores ways to foster a team that feels safe and can count on each other.
• Do team members share information to support the success of other members? If so, how, and if not, why not?
  • Leveraging team wisdom workshop materials help your team learn to share information effectively.
  • Psychologically safe team assessment helps to assess how employees feel being a member of your team. It measures how team members feel about how they interact with each other and their sense of inclusion.
• Do your team members feel they have a good work-life balance? What contributes to this – positively or negatively?
  • Setting healthy boundaries helps team members set healthy boundaries for themselves. Share this resource with specific employees or with the entire team.
  • Employee workload stress provides strategies and tools leaders can use to help their employees manage workload stress. This helps prevent it from interfering with their work-life balance.
  • Workload reflection and discussion tool | PDF can help prevent workload from having a negative impact on well-being and success at work.
  • Putting balance on the agenda helps your team develop strategies for better work-life balance.

Psychological harm at work

Serious traumatic incidents at work pose a risk for psychological harm. Such events often involve a threat to life or safety. This is most often related to first responders and high-risk work. Any situation in any job that leaves a person feeling overwhelmed or unsafe can affect their ability to work and cope. This can include perceptions of conflict, bullying, harassment, betrayal or humiliation at work.

The objective facts don’t determine whether an event will affect someone negatively. The negative impact is determined by a person's subjective emotional experience of the event combined with their own level of resilience. 

The more unprepared or helpless someone feels in a situation, the more likely they may be at risk for harm. Preparing employees for challenging situations and helping them with problem-solving skills, reduces risk of harm.

The need for team resilience

Many common work situations pose potential risks to psychological safety, such as:

• Bullying, harassment, or violence at work
• Ethical or moral dilemmas
• Negative, aggressive, or angry clients or patients
• Threatening or intimidating management approaches
• Humiliation or ridicule
• Discrimination, false accusations, or perceived injustice
• Isolation, redeployment, relocation or termination

While striving to prevent these risks at work through policy and procedures is critical, they may still happen. This can have long-term impacts on affected employees. Building team resilience can help reduce the risk or intensity of psychological harm to employees. It can also lower the risk of damage to the organization’s reputation and bottom line.

Ready to take action?

Increase team resilience

To increase team resilience, work together to build trust, develop coping strategies, increase support and improve self-awareness and communication. 

• Psychologically safe team assessment helps to assess how employees feel being a member of your team. It measures how they feel about interactions with each other and their sense of inclusion. You can get a free report that helps you target your efforts towards issues identified by your members.
• Team building activities has lots of options aimed at improving emotional intelligence and resilience. Just 30 minutes a week can make a difference over time.
• Building stronger teams is a free downloadable book. It has strategies and team activities for leaders ready to improve their team’s resilience and protect psychological safety.
• Resilience can help improve our ability to bounce back after a potential health, personal, or work crisis. It includes sections for leaders, employees and the self-employed.

Workshop materials

Building resilience workshop

This workshop can be tailored to any combination of groups. These include employees, leaders, those who are self-employed or post-secondary students. Participants engage in a journey of self-discovery while creating a plan to improve their resilience. They’ll develop healthy coping strategies for whatever life throws at them.

Evidence for building team resilience

• We know resilience protects against burnout. Moral distress was a significant predictor of all 3 aspects of burnout. The association between burnout and resilience was strong. Greater resilience protected workers from emotional exhaustion and added to personal accomplishment (Rushton et al., 2015).
• Building resilience is a preventive rather than reactionary strategy. A focus on the development of preventive strategies against psychological ill health, and providing treatment as well as rehabilitation can help nurses manage psychological distress at work (Olatunde & Odusanya, 2015).
• Preparing employees for potentially stressful work situations builds their resilience to withstand them. This shares how perceptions of at-work hazards may reduce employees’ psychological health  (McCaughey et al., 2015).

Share this webpage with anyone who manages, leads or supports a team of individuals. It can help them support the resilience, productivity, and well-being of their team.