Resilience in the workplace is an essential skill for thriving in today’s rapidly changing world.
I think of resilience as bouncing forward after a challenge (as opposed to the classic “bouncing back”). Instead of encountering a challenge and simply getting back on your feet, you emerge stronger and more capable than before.
I believe that this forward-thinking approach to resilience in the workplace is crucial as we navigate the ongoing economic uncertainty and overall stress that’s so common in our professional lives.
In this guide, I’ll outline my approach to building personal resilience at work, how it leads to better stress management, work-life balance, and productivity, and why it’s something every employer and employee should cultivate.
What Is Resilience In the Workplace?
I specialize in building more passionate, emotionally intelligent teams. It’s something I’ve talked about a lot—for example, a few years ago in an episode of the TeamBuilding Saves the World podcast, we discussed the concept of resiliency and why it matters.
First and foremost, resilience is the act of experiencing something challenging and coming out on the other side stronger—in other words, as I said earlier, bouncing forward.
In today’s stressful environment of economic uncertainty, resiliency training can give your team the ability to weather new challenges and navigate society’s general state of uncertainty, helping them become stronger than ever.
Basics of Resiliency
The primary key to resilience and bouncing forward is maintaining an attitude of perseverance, looking ahead, and finding new ways to thrive, even when challenges emerge.
Building personal resilience at work in this way can help employees manage their stress in effective ways, maintain a better work-life balance, and become more productive.
It does, however, call for self-care and balance in all aspects of your life.
The good news is that every employee, regardless of their position, can tap into self-care to build resilience. And this will serve them well into whatever the future might bring.
Why Is Resilience Important in the Workplace?
Leaders who focus on building employee resilience often have team members who better understand how to deal with uncertainty at work. This leads to higher workplace morale and even improved employee retention.
Creating a cycle of growth and improvement, especially during unpredictable times, also enhances things like:
- Stress management
- Employee burnout prevention
- Healthy work-life balance
- Workplace productivity and innovation
- Interpersonal relationships at work
Remember, it’s not just about enduring difficulties and bouncing back—it’s about growing stronger because of them and bouncing forward. For example, this approach can help your team bounce forward (instead of back) after remote work burnout.
The Foundation of the Resiliency Pyramid
Want to stay happy and healthy in a world of fear and uncertainty? I’ve got you covered!
I’ve been studying the concept of resilience for years, and I’ve developed a foolproof approach that I call the Resiliency Pyramid.
It all starts with the foundation of the pyramid—the three fundamental pillars that support brain function and overall well-being.
Start by applying these healthy habits in your own life to set a good example, and then find ways to encourage your team to do the same. There’s no downside—it simply leads to far better workers in the long run!
So, let’s dig into the basis of the Resiliency Pyramid to get you started. Here’s an outline of the seven steps to build resilience in the workplace.
1. Sleep: Aim for Eight Hours
Research indicates that adults between the ages of 18 and 64 typically require 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night on average. It acts as something of a car wash for your brain, helping to clear and process information from the day.
On the flip side, according to the American Heart Association, sleep deprivation “increases the risk of atrial fibrillation, cardiometabolic syndrome (a group of conditions that increases the likelihood of Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, or stroke).”
Since we’re talking all about employee resiliency, here’s another key benefit of sleep: Those who’ve mastered skills in just 10,000 hours averaged 8+ hours of sleep a night!
Sleep optimization tips
Now, you probably already know that you need to get enough sleep—it’s something most of us have been hearing our whole lives. The question is, how do you make it happen?
Here are my tried-and-true tips, all backed by sleep science:
- Create a Bed Cave: In other words, make sure you have a dark, cool, and quiet environment to sleep. Use light-blocking curtains, white noise machines, and adjust the temperature in your space to 65-68°F each night.
- Implement screen-free time: It’s important to avoid blue light at least 1 hour before bed—it’s best to put down and turn off all screens during this time. If you don’t have a choice, at least use warm screen settings or blue light-blocking glasses.
- Keep a consistent schedule: Make it easier for your body to maintain this schedule by waking up and going to bed at the same time every day. This will help your circadian rhythm adjust.
- Avoid substances close to bed: Stop drinking caffeine at least six to eight hours before bed, and avoid alcohol consumption at least three hours before sleep. Both substances can lead to waking up in the middle of the night more often.
- Exercise daily: Regular exercise helps improve sleep quality and makes it easier for your body to get to sleep at night.
- Get outside: Natural light exposure helps regulate your circadian rhythm and makes it easier to fall asleep at night. Sunlight exposure in the morning can also boost your energy levels.
- Use a 20-minute rule: If you can’t fall asleep within 20 minutes, get out of bed and do something else, such as reading a book for 20-30 minutes. Then go to bed and try to fall asleep again.
2. Move: Exercise for Your Brain and Body
Exercise offers countless health benefits, and it’s impossible to cover them all in a single article. Entire books have been written on the subject, so I’ll just stick to the basics for the purpose of this article.
First and foremost, exercise offers physical health benefits:
- Builds stronger muscles
- Strengthens your bones
- Improves skin quality
- Regulates blood sugar and insulin levels
- Increases overall energy levels
- Reduces the risks of chronic diseases like obesity, heart disease, stroke, and many types of cancer
Secondly, exercise offers a wide range of benefits for your brain health:
- Improves brain power and critical thinking skills
- Reduces the risk of dementia
- Lowers levels of stress hormones
- Boost blood flow to the brain
- Minimizes inflammation
- Enhances moods
- Increases productivity
- Decreases the risk and severity of mental health challenges like depression and anxiety
The lists of exercise benefits for your body and mind could keep going for quite a while, but you get the idea. All of this translates into better skills as your employees learn how to cope with uncertainty at work and build their resiliency.
Exercise framework tips
Like sleep, you’ve probably known that you should exercise regularly for a while—it’s typically a matter of actually making it happen, not being unaware of the benefits.
Here’s what you should be aiming for:
- Aerobic, Strength, and Flexibility: You need to train all three areas of fitness to maintain your mind and body properly. Make sure you’re working on at least one category every day.
- Weekly goals: Aim for a minimum of 150 minutes of aerobic exercise each week, with twice-weekly strength training sessions of at least 30 minutes. If possible, try to stretch daily.
- Take movement breaks: Ideally, we wouldn’t have desk jobs or spend long periods sitting down. Since we don’t live in a perfect world, set an alarm every 30 minutes—when it goes off, get up and walk around for at least 60 seconds.
- Track your progress: You don’t have to pay for a fitness tracker subscription, but I do suggest wearing a pedometer to make sure you’re taking 10,000 steps daily or a total of 70,000 steps weekly.
- Exercise in the morning: Starting your day with a workout gives you more energy throughout the day—it sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true! Trust me.
- Try exercise before painkillers: Exercising releases all sorts of feel-good hormones, and it often reduces pain naturally. It can get rid of a headache or stop your joints from aching without the need for painkillers.
3. Eat: Quality Over Quantity
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” – Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food
How you fuel your body matters. You literally become the nutrients you put into your body, and it has just as large an impact on your life as exercise and sleep. Trust me—focusing on nutrition with your team is worth it!
Now, there are too many different diets and eating rules to list here, but it doesn’t need to be that difficult. I eat according to these seven food rules:
- Never eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food
- Avoid foods with more than five ingredients whenever possible
- Shop the perimeter of the store—that’s where the fresh foods are
- Don’t eat anything that won’t eventually rot
- Always leave the table slightly hungry
- Enjoy meals with the people you love
- Don’t buy food where you buy gas
I’ll stop here because, like exercise and sleep, entire books can and have been written on the topic of nutrition. At the end of the day, though, common sense should be enough to help you know what you should be eating if you’re honest with yourself.
It’s more than worth it, too. Following a healthy diet offers benefits like:
- Improved health health
- Reduced risk of chronic disease and conditions like obesity, stroke, heart disease, Type 2 Diabetes, and cancer
- Better mood
- Lower risk and severity of mental health conditions like depression
- Improved gut health and digestion
- Increased cognitive capacity and better memory
- Weight loss
- Stronger bones and teeth
- Improved sleep quality
You get the idea. Eating well can change your entire life. It can change how you think, feel, and look. Ultimately, it can also give you the edge you need to succeed in life, making it easier for you to build resilience in the workplace.
And getting your team to focus on nutrition can be as simple as enjoying healthy work lunches together—slow and steady wins the race, after all.
Additional nutrition tips
Again, you’ve probably known you need to follow a healthy diet for most of your life! The trick is actually doing it. Here are my tips to optimize your diet in order to optimize your life.
- Focus on lifestyle changes: Fad diets rarely work—that’s why there are so many of them! Focus on lifestyle changes like eating more whole foods, avoiding processed foods, and cooking healthy meals at home instead of going out.
- Don’t multitask while eating: When you’re doing other things during a meal, you’re much more likely to overeat and fail to appreciate your meal.
- Keep the good stuff within reach: By making healthy foods easily accessible and junk foods harder to reach, you’ll gently encourage your brain to reach for the good stuff and build healthy, nutritious habits.
- Avoid sugar whenever possible: Skip foods with added sugars—that includes honey, maple syrup, and agave—and avoid all artificial sweeteners. When you have a sweet craving, reach for fresh fruits.
- Cook your own food: Homemade food is almost always better for you because it’s less processed, has fewer ingredients, and is generally more nutritious.
- Drink water when you’re hungry: The human body often confuses thirst for hunger. When you feel hungry, drink 10 ounces of water and wait 30 minutes to see if it goes away.
- Build meals around fruits and veggies: Remember the quote from the beginning of this section? Most of your diet should be plants—structure your meals around fruits and veggies, then add a bit of protein on the side.
Beyond the Foundation: The Full Resiliency Pyramid
If you can help your team start sleeping enough, exercising regularly, and eating well, you’ll be well ahead of the pack. That said, the pyramid doesn’t stop at the foundation—it keeps going up.
Here are the final four elements of building resilience in the workplace to encourage within your team.
4. Outside: Spend Time Outdoors
Even 30 minutes outside provides significant health benefits. Seriously, just looking at green views from the window can improve one’s mood and even speed up the healing process. It also provides a better big picture perspective.
Parks and small green spaces in the city provide health benefits, too—you don’t need to drive to the forest to benefit from being outside.
This can be as simple as scheduling monthly outdoor team building activities as part of your efforts to support your team’s physical and mental health.
5. Focus: Fine-Tune Your Circle of Influence
What you focus on can have a dramatic influence on your mind and habits. I suggest avoiding excessive news consumption and setting a 5-minute timer when you do indulge in a headline.
Instead, keep your mind focused on what you can control and change. This is proven to prevent “learned helplessness,” which can stem from constant negative input caused by news headlines.
And remember, concentrate on areas where you’re competent and can make a difference!
6. Connection: Expand Your Social Circle
Connecting with others can improve your state of mind, mood, and even your health. Try reaching out to people across these three timeframes:
- Past: Reconnect with old friends
- Present: Deepen current friendships
- Future: Connect with people you’d like to know better
Connecting with your family, friends, pets, and even nature (which often allows you to connect with yourself) is always healthy. And if you can’t get together with a friend in person, opt for video calls—they provide more benefits than just audio conversation.
7. Appreciation: Foster an Attitude of Gratitude
The health benefits of appreciating what you have and feeling thankful for it are scientifically proven, so what do you have to lose?
Make a habit of expressing gratitude and thinking about why you’re thankful for what you have in your life right now. Don’t forget to appreciate that your basic needs are met—many people in this world don’t have stable food, water, and shelter.
Finally, try to appreciate the present moment whenever possible. As the saying goes, the present moment is truly all you have. If you’re not appreciating it, you’re missing out!
Ready To Use the Pyramid for Your Team? It’s Time To Build Resilience in the Workplace!
It’s not as easy as reminding your team members that these things are important. If that were the case, the entire world would be healthy! Instead, you’ll need to positively support your team to start this positive cycle:
- Better sleep can give them more energy to exercise
- More exercise can give them a better appetite for quality food
- Better nutrition and exercise can improve sleep quality
And that’s just the foundational three! Get these down and your team will be bouncing forward before you know it.
Not sure how to go about it? The experts and facilitators here at TeamBonding can help! For example, our Team Wellbeing program is designed to enhance employee wellness using our custom app, and it’s a great place to start.
That’s not all, though—we have over 200 team building events you can use to start helping your team lead healthier, happier lives and improving their resilience in the workplace!
Contact us today to discuss how we can help.
