Blog

Resilience Training and Assessment

19 March 2017

The term resilience, in the context of the workplace, refers to both organisational resilience and individual resilience.

Developing individual resilience within an organisation will, in turn, undoubtedly improve employee health and wellbeing, engagement, productivity and performance.

Resilient and healthy organisations have the capacity to respond quickly and effectively to internal and external pressures for change, and have a greater prospect of continuing success. Given that organisations are formed of people working together for a common purpose, corporate resilience is, effectively, the accumulated resilience of individuals who make up the workforce. Corporate resilience focuses on creating the environment that pre-disposes the workforce to be resilient, so that the workforce as a whole makes the organisation resilient.

Psychological resilience is defined as an individual’s ability to successfully adapt to life tasks in the face of social disadvantage or adverse conditions. Adversity and stress can come in the shape of family or relationship problems, health problems, or workplace and financial worries, among others. Resilience is one’s ability to bounce back from a negative experience with “competent functioning”. Put simply, resilience is the ability to cope with and rise to the inevitable challenges, problems and set-backs one meets in the course of one’s life, and come back stronger from them.

Resilience relies on different skills and draws on various sources of help. Psychologists have identified some of the factors that make someone resilient, among them a positive attitude, optimism, awareness, the ability to regulate emotions, rational thinking skills, physical and mental health, good relationships which can be drawn on, and the ability to see failure as a form of helpful feedback. Even after misfortune, resilient individuals are blessed with such an outlook that they are able to change course and move on.

Resilience is not a rare ability; in reality, it is found in the average individual and it can be learned and developed by virtually anyone. Resilience should be considered a process, rather than a trait to be had.

Through a combination of lectures, workshops, training (group and one-to-one) and psychometric analysis, our team of experts are able to identify and address challenges and issues affecting both organisational and individual resilience. They can advise and support organisations and their employees to better target and manage workplace issues and stress, improve confidence and relationships, and perform under pressure.