The digital age has accelerated the pace of change, magnified uncertainty and job instability, and driven the need for more work–personal life integration. In the process, employees have suffered a dramatic rise in emotional health issues. They routinely report change fatigue, a lack of clarity around expectations, insufficient undertanding of how to perform their jobs, and an inability to disconnect from work. Employee stress costs U.S. companies alone $1 trillion annually in increased healthcare costs, reduced productivity, and lost opportunities.
Traditional solutions have usually focused on trying to reduce the impact of stress. Approaches such as protecting time away from work, focusing on individual well-being programs, and trying to incorporate more fun at work are all attempts to reduce the tremendous impact that stress is having on individuals and organizations.
It says something about the size of the problem that, despite our best efforts, employee stress is still having a massive impact on both the well-being of employees and the bottom line of organizations. The solution is not merely a matter of scale—more wellness initiatives aren’t going to close the gap. We have to fundamentally change how we perceive and respond to stress in the working environment. Organizations need a new playbook that is designed for the unique challenges of the digital age.
AchieveForum recently completed a research project to start building this new playbook. The project combined AchieveForum’s research archives, third-party research, and a survey of 370 employees and frontline leaders on characteristics of resilience and secondary research. Our goal was to identify how organizations can create more resilient workplaces that reduce employee stress and increase corporate performance.
We learned that companies can improve their results by moving beyond traditional practices and fostering resilient organizations. In particular, we recommend three shifts for organizations to become more resilient:
- Adopt a team-centric approach.
- Dynamically establish clarity.
- Leverage stress to address the root causes of organizational challenges.
1. Pause and determine how to lead: Managers in resilient organizations pause and first determine how best to lead through the situation.
2. Identify root causes: When challenges arise, people naturally focus on the consequences. Resilient organizations take the time to reflect on and mitigate root causes.
3. Experiment with solutions: In a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, even good ideas to address root causes often don’t produce the expected results. Hence, we need to encourage teams to experiment by forming hypotheses and capturing what they learn.
Hopefully this snapshot gives you a sense for both the importance of resilience in the modern workplace, and how to begin building it. If you’d like to learn more, download our full research report.
How does your organization foster resilience? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.
