Resilience is not just a personal problem but also a business problem — one that can cost billions. To create real, positive change and improve employee resilience, companies should support mental health with four foundational pillars, says Dr. Nick Taylor, CEO, and co-founder, Unmind.
Resilience is not a new concept. That said, it is a word that has popped up more frequently over the past several months and gotten a revived focus among HR and people leaders. Why? Because it is being put to the test like never before — and the way a lack of resilience feeds on itself and exacerbates other mental unwellness has played out in company after company.
After all, resilienceOpens a new window is what gives people the psychological strength to cope with stress and hardship. Individuals with greater resilience are better equipped to deal with the unexpected and more likely to bounce back from difficult situations. On the other hand, when someone is struggling, and their resilience is lowered, coping becomes difficult. The stress can take over, driving resilience lower, creating more negative experiences and difficult situations, and worsening other mental health ailments. It is a cyclical demon. And what the last year certainly has not been short on is stress and difficult situations to test and exacerbate employee resilience.
Add in the stress of employees returning to a workplace that may feel unsafe, where their former colleagues no longer have a job, or where their role simply is not what it was seven months ago. Suddenly work stress has a whole new set of triggers to start its circular, harmful path that can flourish in people or organizations with low resilience.
The bottom line: Resilience is not now, and never has been, just a personal problem. It is a business one. The stakes are just higher now, and the opportunities to test resilience are more numerous. Fortunately, modern, clinically supported technology in the right employee mental health platform offers a way to get off the resilience merry-go-round.
Learn more: Your Employees Want More Mental Health Support, Says SilverCloud Health Study
Resilience: Fundamental To Total Wellbeing (and Vice Versa)
First, it is essential to realize that resilience does not exist in a vacuum. It is a major factor in overall wellbeing. As explained in an articleOpens a new window by the Mayo Clinic, resilience can, for example, better protect a person from mental ill-health. And the workplace cost of mental ill-health is enormous. Conditions like depression and anxiety contribute to the $53 billion annual costs of absences among U.S. workers attributed to mental ill-health. If your workforce is not well — mentally, socially, or physically — neither is your company, regardless of whether you acknowledge this.
The last year has tested employee resilience more than any event in recent history. A recent reportOpens a new window by Cigna shows that “despite having the highest levels of resilience when compared to those furloughed or laid off, nearly two-thirds (63%) of full-time workers are still considered to have only low or moderate resilience.†The deteriorating resilience in the workforce has had a direct effect on costly issues such as turnover, lower job satisfaction, lower performance, weaker work relationships, lack of community, and an inability to cope.
Resilience has become a massive challenge for employers when you consider the part it plays in supporting an employee’s overall wellbeing — and vice versa. An employee’s resilience will suffer when other aspects of their total wellbeing suffer when the basic areas of daily life that nourish psychological, social, and physical wellbeing are not supported.
The question becomes: What are employers supposed to do? How can they help manage the impact of stress, low resilience, and mental ill-health among their workforce? They should help break the cycle that low resilience can foster and create a positive experience for their workforce.
Learn more: 5 Crucial Elements of a Workplace Mental Health Platform to Support Managers and Mental Health Success
Breaking the Cycle
Solving mental health challenges reactively does not work. One in five Americans will experience mental ill-health each year. Reactive, treatment-focused solutions simply focus on that one in five. To break the negative cycle of low resilience, high stress, and low performance, companies need to be proactive. To create real, positive change and avoid the potential financial burden of widespread mental ill-health among a workforce, employers need to focus on five in five. After all, we are all on some spectrum of mental health all the time. This is why it is possible for any company to take a major leap in improving employee resilience — and mental health overall. The key is to support mental health with four foundational pillars:
- Whole-person, whole-organization approach rooted in clinical psychology: By starting with the mindset of addressing the whole person, you, in turn, address the entire organization. For a mental health platform to succeed company-wide and nourish every employee, it must take a whole-person approach to mental health. This means relying on a tool that did not just start as a calming or centering app but is rooted in psychology. This is the North Star approach to mental health.
- A focus on proactive prevention for every employee: Too many platforms and apps today fail to speak to the entire employee base. These solutions miss speaking to the five in five. They only focus on the one in five who are already struggling. This is not a long-term solution to the mental ill-health issue many organizations are facing. Instead, a focus on prevention rather than reaction is the key.
- Empowerment for employees — insights for employers: Too many of today’s solutions focus on only one of the three areas of the whole person. Their programs support psychological, social, or physical health, but rarely all three, and rarely with clinically backed methods. To achieve a new, proactive vision of mental health for your workforce, you need to be able to impact each of these three areas.
- The right support from experienced, dedicated specialists: Employers need customized support to make even the best-planned and most sufficiently backed solutions work. And not just any support, but the support of experienced, dedicated client service experts. Engagement and awareness of available programs and tools are required for widespread adoption.
More and more companies are implementing mental health and wellbeing programs to improve resilience, reduce stress, and more. Fortunately, these programs exist digitally and can be accessed during the recent pandemic when the services are needed most.
Learn more: With or Without a Global Pandemic, Prioritize Employee Mental Health
To proactively prevent mental ill-health, wellbeing solutions should meet people where they are, when they need it, every day. Using technology built from the ground up to streamline the delivery of wellbeing solutions and support all four foundational pillars above is the key to truly improving employee resilience and, in turn, mental health.
It is time to move beyond the traditional, treatment-focused solutions and go deeper and broader than what is possible with mindfulness-type solutions that do not truly address mental health — or that fail to affect the whole person and the whole organization. A business is only as well as its workforce.