It Never Gets Easier. You Just Get Better
The global economy loses one trillion dollars every year because of stress, burnout and poor mental health. Today, one in every four people suffers from depression. Poor mental health conditions are more common than cancer, diabetes, or heart disease. One person commits suicide every thirty seconds.
Research by the World Health Organization suggests that every dollar invested in employee mental health yields a 4x return. But what exactly can an organization do to ensure its employees become and stay mentally tough, and be resilient?
Resilience does for mental health what exercising does for physical health. Resilience, the learned ability to cope from normal stressors of life and bounce back from setbacks has been identified as the key skill that impacts success, health and mental wellbeing the most in an individual.
Organizational resilience is defined as ‘the ability of a system to withstand changes in its environment and still function’. An organization’s resilience is nothing but the collective resilience of its people - starting with its leaders. Psychological resilience is the ability to successfully cope with a crisis and to return to pre-crisis status quickly.
Resilience exists when the person uses "mental processes and behaviours in promoting personal assets and protecting an individual from the potential negative effects of stressors". In simpler terms, psychological resilience exists in people who develop psychological and behavioral capabilities that allow them to remain calm during crises or chaos and to move on from the incident without long-term negative consequences.
The focus on employee well-being and engagement, though extremely popular among leaders and management consultants, is quite paternalistic. The assumption that an organization and its managers can reach out to its employees, from top and from outside, and help employees to stay well and function to the best of their capabilities to deliver high-performance, is flawed at several levels.
While engagement indicators can be observed and measured, they can hardly be influenced directly. Most organizations that measure employee engagement struggle to make any sustainable progress on improving its engagement scores year on year.
Leaders end up spending resources on pointless pursuits that are worthwhile only when they are new. With time, employees adapt to new perks and feel envious hearing about incentives in other organizations. However, this does not pose the biggest challenge to an organization, as long as they have the capacity to consistently roll out new programs and be willing to keep step with changing industry scenarios and their peers.
The bigger challenge associated with trying to manage employee engagement is not its inefficacy, but the harm such a well-meaning agenda can cause to the organization’s culture. At a fundamental level, most programs in the name of employee engagement send a loud message to its employees that the organization and its managers are responsible for minimizing their challenges and rescuing them during tough situations.
Attempts to build a caring culture often leads to one infected by entitlement, externalization and inaction. People do not build strengths, instead they build dependence.
To survive disruption, an organization does not need just engaged employees, it needs resilient employees. Resilient people do not wait for someone else to engage them, instead they manage themselves.
In times of adversity, being an attractive organization for those who thrive in face of adversity, hardly has any advantage. Resilient people are not attracted to comforts, rather they seek challenges that offer them opportunities to become stronger and grow.
Great organizations and their leaders build a culture that values initiative, accountability and resilience. They offer their employees challenges and psychological bandages to help them grow stronger by facing adversities.
They do not measure happiness of their employees with respect to cushy benefits or incentives. Instead, they measure how tough their employees are, while facing setbacks and challenges. They measure and build resilience and not engagement.
