‘When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in’: 3 systems for understanding and building employee resilience
A quick peak into Google Trends data shows, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the phrase ‘unprecedented times’ surged in popularity as a search term between April and May this year. And yet by now, if you are anything like me, you will sigh any time you hear the expression uttered by a politician, news outlet, colleague or friend. Unprecedented times.
There is no question that the impact of the pandemic has been extraordinary, asking questions of organisations and individuals at every level. But look here and you’ll also find data to support a fact most of us already knew — that uncertainty is one of life’s few certainties. The ups and downs of life are constant, and we will be measured not just by our coping capacity, but more importantly our ability to bounce back.
As businessperson and philanthropist Sheryl Sandberg recalls two weeks after the sudden loss of her husband, and when preparing for a father-child activity. “I want Dave,” I cried. And a friend said to me, “Option A is not available. So let’s just kick the shit out of Option B.”
We define the ability to respond to or recover readily from a crisis or disruptive process as — you guessed it — resiliency. Resilience is not dealt out in fixed amounts, we can prepare ourselves to become resilient. So just how can business leaders identify signs of life-changing challenges amongst teams, and help individuals to build resilience for long-term collective gains?
Some good news — Your team is probably more resilient today than 6 months ago.
The figure below is taken from a new study which shows that employees who have experienced more changes in circumstances as a result of Covid-19 are significantly more likely to be ‘highly resilient’. 13.2 times more so, in fact. This is surprising and encouraging, and especially in an industry like mine, where in a normal year, large agencies see average annual employee turnover as high as 30%.
Becoming resilient — things to think about
For individuals in most teams, the effects felt by Covid-19 exist on a spectrum that probably ranges somewhere from ‘inconvenient and tiresome’ to ‘traumatic and life-changing.’ But the changes we have gone through will most certainly have lasting consequences. As business leaders there are (at least) 3 key themes we must consider:
1. Talking about hardship
2. Supporting others
3. Choosing your response
Upon the onset of Covid-19, like every business, at my company we had to make fast decisions relating to the way we worked together. As more information became available or regulations evolved, some of these decisions changed. It goes without saying that we didn’t get it right every time, but as part of our response and recovery plan we did introduce 3 new systems to get to grips with how our teams were feeling and to ensure the definition of the path forward was a collaborative process.
All 3 of these systems are still in place today, and will most likely be carried forward in to 2021:
Firstly, Setup a dialogue and feedback platform
Fear of the unknown is one of the most powerful negative influences on people’s mental wellbeing. So open dialogue around how your team is feeling, and more importantly what is making them feel that way, goes some way to shifting that fear from an unknown to a known phenomenon.
Coaching
Earlier this year, a Coaching expert joined us to set up an agency-wide coaching mechanism, with the objective of giving employees a confidential platform to discuss factors relating to their employee experience. Under this structure, each employee selects a coach (which can be anyone from within or outside the organisation), and meets at least once monthly to have a conversation that sits outside of typical management lines. Coaches are trained in skills such as Active Listening and Powerful Questions, and topics covered include well-being, specialist and people skills and individual learning goals. Putting feelings into words can help us overcome adversity and by monitoring progress closely coaches are able to help employees navigate uncertainties.
Employee Engagement Surveys
For many of us it might feel like the goalposts are moving daily. What was true yesterday might not be true today. To ensure we provide employees with a constant feedback loop, we send out frequent employee engagement surveys, asking questions relating to:
- Company Engagement
- Company and me
- Job Role/ Relationship
- Wellness
- Praise & Recognition
Some of these questions we ask monthly, others quarterly. You may like to send a survey out following key milestones such as: changes in strategy, financial updates or appraisal and bonus announcements. This is a good resource for learning more about employee engagement surveys, as is this.
Secondly, Emphasize inclusion through co-creation of business strategy
Most often the path forward is not straightforward. To ensure that team members are an integral part of defining our plan to rebound, we de-centralised agency decision-making into management teams.
By granting control of our response to more people, our teams are now collectively empowered to influence decisions that will define the future of our business. From an operational perspective this has been particularly important as we moved our office from fully in-person to fully virtual. Truthfully, I think we hope that these teams will expand over time giving the opportunity for more voices to be heard, but we already see positive side-effects such as burden relief for those who had traditionally been tasked with decision-making, and being better equipped overall to deal with future crises or emergencies. Decentralized management isn’t a new theme, but you may find value in this McKinsey resource on untangling decision-making.
Thirdly, Perpetuate career progression (even if it feels like things are standing still)
As the recent surge in subscriptions to self-learning and online courses shows, this is a great moment to reflect on professional growth and career ambitions and to take steps to improve. As psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Victor E. Frankel put it “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
Earlier this year, we asked every employee to complete a ‘Skills Profile’, outlining their Professional and People-related strengths and weaknesses, as well as individual learning goals.
As employees this helped give us the clarity to reflect on where we stand today and where we would like to get to, and as employers it gave us overview of the skills and competencies that exist collectively within our team. Much to our surprise, we also uncovered skillsets within the agency we didn’t even know existed (the program manager who moonlights as an illustrator).
Setting up the Skills Profile is one thing, and truthfully we see varying levels of uptake and commitment amongst employees. We’ve used the Skills Profile as the foundation for coaching conversations, appraisal conversations and for casting team members on to new projects. We also encourage freelancers or contractors to complete one. For those team members who have committed to frequent self-reflective dialogue around progress and development the value has been unquestionable. As with almost anything, things become a lot clearer when you write them down.
In conclusion, I’ll return to those 3 key themes for leaders to foster resilience. (1) Think about ways you can make it easier for team members to talk about hardships, (2) Put processes in place for employees to support each other and (3) Establish an inclusive structure for decision-making in response to the crisis.
And as a closing thought, I’ll turn to Kafka Tamura’s alter-ego in Murakami’s Kafka by the Shore:
“… once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
Samuel Christian, Business Director, MullenLowe Hong Kong & Japan
