How resilient is your organisation to global economic changes? The nature of change has been vastly witnessed across workforce, nature of jobs, styles of working, and emergence of new business models coming to play, especially after the global economic downturn.
During the six-year period post the recession, from 2010 to 2016 people across all levels of an organisation are finding it difficult to relax, make time for fitness, also intensity and impulse control has been on a decline ever since then.
In fact, data shows 30 percent reduction in daily practice of relaxation is the foundation for physical, emotional and cognitive resilience. Conversely, factors including one’s connection, health awareness, biological insight, engagement and values alignment have improved over time.
Many more of such interesting insights on the importance of resilience in our daily life and its impact on work-life practices have been unveiled in a recently released 2016/2017 Global Resilience Diagnostic Report, by Springfox, formerly known as The Resilience Institute in Australia.
Based on a study of 26,099 professionals over a six-year period, the report shows that 55 percent professionals worry excessively, 50 percent are hyper vigilant, 45 percent experience distress symptoms, 30 percent have impulse control problems, 35 percent are unable to relax, and 30 percent experience excessive work intensity.
“The research shows that the state of the modern workforce isn’t conducive to organisations being as innovative, adaptive and successful as they could be. This is an anxious and overloaded workforce that suffers from absenteeism, presenteeism, conflicts and attention loss. Resilience in an organisation works to mitigate against these issues. Fortunately resilience is proven to be a learned quality that can be taught,” said Stuart Taylor CEO of Springfox.
Age Matters
The data shows that resilience tends to increase with age, especially in the trained mind category, led by focus and decisiveness. Significant life events experienced as we get older, impact our levels of resilience and our ability to adapt, change, and grow.
Women show most improvement during their younger and older years, whilst men between the ages of 31-50 display the highest increase in resilience.
See: Resilience in the Workplace: Impact on Employee Well-Being
Gender Counts
The report illustrates that gender plays an important role in one’s resilience levels and that men and women have different needs and solutions. Overall, male resilience ratios (2.31:1) are higher than female ratios (2.11:1) and men improve more with training.
Females tend to score poorly in distress, vulnerability and withdrawn categories. Having said this, women are more engaged and positive, eat better, and score higher on EQ factors (positivity, connection, empathy, insight).
CEOs Should Lead by Example
Senior leadership in an organisation must shape, promote and model resilience. The data reveals that a stress-based culture typically stems from the top at the C-suite level. The most resilient organisations are those that have a leadership team, which takes systematic and active approach to participating in and modelling resilience.
When leadership fails to demonstrate resilience, this is reflected in the organisation at large resulting in an underperforming workforce. “This highlights that it’s critical for leadership to commit themselves to practices that will lead their teams to be more resilient. Leaders drive culture, and culture drives performance,” said Mr Taylor.
Resilience is not Innate, It’s Learnt
With intervention, every category and factor of resilience improves. The data shows a clear increase in resilience ratios after resilience programmes. The average improvement is 25 percent, with some subjects even doubling their levels of resilience.
Global Diversity
Resilience is globally relevant and locally distinct. While there is little difference in resilience starting points between regions, responses to resilience interventions do vary by region. The Americas have the greatest increase in resilience ratio after resilience programmes, whilst South East Asia has the lowest.
Also read: HR Research Insights: Flexibility & Resilience = Productivity & Health
Feature image credit: Freepik
