How will resilience training impact your bottom line?
The bottom line is what keeps organisations afloat, and in the choppy waters that UK politics and the world’s economy are sailing through right now, this has never been more true.
However much you care about the wellbeing of your team, understanding how resilience training will impact your bottom line is maybe going to be the biggest decider when it comes to bringing resilience into your learning and development programme.
In a nutshell, resilience is the capacity to adapt to various kinds of adversity.
It’s a specific sort of strength.
To deal with ongoing change and financial uncertainty asks a lot of any team or individual. It can’t be done without a strong foundation.
Resilience is the foundation, and a resilient foundation is made up out of multiple habits and patterns of behaviour.
These can range from how we eat and how much we move, to how skillfully we observe ourselves and listen to others.
Resilience training impacts the bottom line by enabling organisations to replace weakening behaviours with strengthening ones.
In a sense, resilience can be understood as resource management; the skill with which we manage key resources like time, trust, energy and attention, from the level of each individual team member, upwards.
To have a workforce that can perform under pressure and remain productive and focused when the field around them is undergoing rapid change, you have to equip your people with the insights, tools and motivation they need to continually invest in their own personal resilience.
As the team becomes stronger, so too will the organisation.
It really is a powerful thing.
But how does such organisational ‘strengthening’ translate to impacts on the bottom line?
Resilience training outcomes not only save money, but they make money.
They include:
Enhanced productivity
Improved problem solving
Increased creative capacity to innovate
Reduced absenteeism
Retention of talent
For example, if the team have enhanced their ability to single-mindedly focus their attention on the problems that can be solved or mitigated against in the here and now, (instead of letting attention leak away into speculative territories) then organisational efficiency will benefit, and costs will be reduced.
Another example is the benefit of increased ‘response flexibility’ within the team that resilience training brings. Response flexibility defined as this:
The ability to “pause, step back, reflect, shift perspectives, create options and choose wisely” (Graham, n.d., in Fernandez, 2016).
Strengthening your people’s ability to be able to respond to challenging situations and people with a considered choice, rather than just react to them, benefits the organisation’s overall capacity to make profitable decisions and avoid expensive mistakes.
And from a simple team-health perspective, the better coping skills, reduced stress and greater employee well-being that research links resilience training to, saves unnecessary staffing expenses.
It’s a win all round – the ways in which resilience training impacts on the bottom line are many and measurable.
Having a resilience training programme in place gives you a real competitive advantage. To find out more about our resilience training programmes, get in touch with us today, we’d love to hear from you:
Exercises that generate conversations and an exploration of ideas promotes open communication in the team, horizontally, across departments and vertically too.
With good communication, ideas can flow between interns and management as much as they can within teams. Diversity of opinion, different perspectives and richness of feedback, it all drives up quality and deepens work relationships.