Do you realize how important it is for you to have a resilient workforce?
Do you realize your company’s success depends on this?
And, do you recognize the answer to building resilience is not simply hosting a brown bag lunch session on stress management?
If you are not sure of the connection between employee resilience and your company’s ability to thrive in this economy, see how many of these questions you answer “Yes” to:
If you answered “Yes” to these questions, you need a resilient workforce.
First off, let’s define resilience, then what it means to have a resilient workforce. Resilience refers to a person’s capacity to handle difficulties, demands, and high pressure without becoming stressed.
To paint a more precise picture of resilience, let’s divide the term into four facets:
A resilient workforce is a productive workforce. A resilient workforce is healthy, energetic, durable, and enthusiastic. Furthermore, borrowing from Harvard Business School’s Rosabeth Moss Kantor, resilient workers are “fast, friendly, flexible, and focused.”
Several years ago, Dr. Kantor used this phrase to describe the qualities companies needed to survive in the new economy.
Since companies are made up of employees, for a company to be “fast, friendly, flexible, and focused,” it obviously needs employees who possess these qualities. Workers who feel stressed out and overwhelmed don’t. Resilient employees do.
The fundamental sources of competitive advantage in today’s economy are frequently identified as being:
Let’s briefly examine how stress makes it difficult – if not impossible – to possess these critical drivers of organizational success.
The connection between employee stress and customer service is pretty obvious: stressed out employees don’t give great service.
They don’t even give good service. Research on the brain supports what we know from personal experience — when stressed, people have difficulty experiencing empathy and compassion for others.
When stressed, people are less likely to respond with patience and goodwill. Thus, if your business’s success depends on providing great customer service – you MUST address employee stress.
The ability to respond quickly to change – In today’s mercurial marketplace, you’re either quick or you’re dead.
Perhaps the most important organizational quality in today’s world of accelerating change is the ability to respond quickly to change. This necessity poses a serious problem for companies with stressed out employees because of what stress does to the brain.
Decades of research on stress have shown that stress activates primitive, hard-wired “programs” in the brain that lead to neophobia (fear of anything new) and behavioral inflexibility (repeating the same action, despite the fact it is not working). Thus, stressed out workers are more likely to fear the new and to cling to old, no longer viable ways.
Conversely, employees who feel energized, confident, and inspired are far more likely to find change exciting and to respond with agility and creativity.
In today’s knowledge economy, “intelligence rules.” Even in companies that are not typically viewed as knowledge-driven, the ability to innovate, to improve processes, to do things faster and more efficiently, all play an important role in success.
Unfortunately for companies with stressed out workers, stress makes people dumber. Decades of research on stress and intellectual functioning support what you have probably observed: when people are stressed, they’re not as creative, they’re not as logical, they’re as capable of noticing alternatives and opportunities.
Stress also compromises this critical source of competitive advantage simply because of how it affects attention and “mind share.” When people feel stressed, the source of their stress dominates their thoughts. Time spent worrying and obsessing is time not spent focusing on one’s job.
For example, the customer service worker whose boss spoke to her in a demeaning way several hours ago is probably not focusing her attention on new ways to improve their service delivery. The IT professional swamped by the workload of two people is probably not formulating new ways to improve system integration.
While talent has always been a key component of success, it will become even more important as the labor pool shrinks with the wave of Baby Boomer retirements.
Your ability to attract and retain talent obviously depends on your reputation as an employer. If your workplace is known as a high-stress, human-unfriendly workplace, you won’t be a talent magnet. You will be a talent repellent.
Even if you have a stellar recruiting team who brings you great employees, if you deliver a negative work experience, they will soon fly back out the door. Thus, employee stress plays a significant role in this critical source of competitive advantage.
Good old-fashioned productivity is still one of the key sources of competitive advantage.
If you compete globally against companies who pay a fraction of American wages, you are no doubt acutely aware of your need to get maximum productivity from each employee. In the short term, stressed out workers can deliver high productivity.
However, stressed out workers eventually burn out, costing you in terms of increased turnover, mistakes, workers compensation claims, and health insurance premiums, thereby reducing your productivity and profitability per employee.
If you want a productive, “fast, friendly, flexible, and focused” workforce, if you want employees who can help you achieve your goals, you need to know how to create a work experience and a work environment that fosters resilience.
Here are three steps you can take: