Raising Engagement and Resilience

Engagement of your people is closely linked to an individual’s resilience in their role. There are three key ways to look at engagement: having psychological meaningfulness and safety in my job, the supply of resources enough to overcome the demands of the job, and engagement as the opposite of burnout. Resilience, as both a capacity and an active process, can reduce burnout and increase psychological safety. With the addition of a performing line manager who provides the right resources and support, engagement flourishes.

Tap’d has researched the aspects of both the work environment and the intrapersonal behaviours and characteristics that come together to create a resilient workforce. From this we have created a model to characterise resilience from two key directions:

• From the organisation view, what are the activities in an organisation that can impact on the resilience of the workforce, both teams and individuals.
• From the individual employee view, what behaviours and thinking mechanisms that promote a sense of resilience within ourselves so that we can take on and cope with the challenges that are presented to us, both as an employee and as a leader.

Our research suggests that the organisation can positively affect the culture of resilience through the areas of communication, collaboration and social support.

It also shows that the individual can learn to increase their resilience by focusing on the areas of optimism, reframing issues, personal drive and adaptability.

We also found that there is a shared focus of overlap where the organisation and the individual can both have a substantial impact on the level of control, having a sense of purpose and a healthy wellbeing and balance in their lives.

Treating engagement and resilience as a single focus for your organisation can have positive, sustainable effects when things are going well and when times are challenging. Our proactive approaches can build resilience bench strength in your organisation to increase engagement effectively in partnership with your teams.