Building Resilience in Your People and Yourself

Posted 13 Jan '23

Building Resilience in Your People and Yourself

Having a healthy workplace that support mental health and builds resilience is a win-win for employers and employees. Research proves that investing in your people’s wellbeing is beneficial to both them and the business overall.

You will know that Work Health and Safety (WHS) regulations require a workplace safe from physical hazards, but did you know that from October 2022, NSW became the first state to adapt new WHS regulations which place requirements on businesses for the management of psychosocial risks.

Let's look at ways leaders and managers can take steps to care for wellbeing and mental health in the workplace, support employee well-being, and build an open and supportive company culture.

Benefits of a resilient workforce

There are many benefits to building employee resilience, from your team members being more engaged and productive to fewer problems with staff absenteeism, burnout, and turnover. It also means you meet your legal obligation to manage risks to employees’ mental and physical health, just like any other health & safety risk.

How to build a resilient workplace

Resilience hinges on giving people opportunities to build the knowledge, skills, and capabilities to really thrive at work and be able to respond effectively to stress, challenges, and change. Cementing well-being in the day-to-day work culture is multi-faceted and takes individual and combined effort. Here are some key components:

• Take the lead - look after your own health and promote honest conversations with your team.
• Increase awareness of wellbeing to help remove stigma around mental health.
• Ensure the work environment is safe and encourage staff to look out for each other.
• Design work to support better work life balance, e.g. involve staff in decisions on when, where, and how work is performed, and closely monitor workloads.
• Invest in training programmes that include mental health awareness, stress management, recovery, and self-care.
• Provide organisational support, e.g. Employee Assistance Programmes that give employees access to trained specialists.
• Offer exercise and mindfulness programmes to support health, e.g. step challenges or lunchtime yoga.

When you’re running and managing a business, busy with the day-to-day, it can be easy to forget that taking care of your own wellbeing and mental health should be a top priority.

Stress can have a serious effect on your health and ability to function, so you need to learn to recognise and support your own wellbeing needs. Because you can’t be at your best, make consistently good decisions, and just as importantly, lead your team and provide the support they need, if you’re under a weight of pressure or struggling with poor mental or physical health.

Building positive habits for yourself is the key to effective, sustainable change, but rather than making a long list of things you want to change and then finding you can’t keep it up, try just changing one thing in your regular routine every month. Here are a few ideas to get you started…

• Take 1,000 more steps per day than you normally do.
• Eat 1 more serving of fruit or vegetables per day or take a multivitamin.
• Set an alarm to get to bed 30 minutes earlier than usual.
• Have some intentional 1-on-1 time with a loved one, each week.
• Each night, write down 3 things you’re grateful for.
• Volunteer at a cause that’s important to you.

You can read more about what are psychosocial hazards and how to manage these from Safe Work Australia.

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