– by Ainsley Lawrence

– Ainsley Lawrence is a freelance writer with an interest in the way business, technology, and education intersect with the personal. She loves traveling to beautiful places and is frequently lost in a good book.

Resilience should be a priority for all organizations. After all, the current business landscape features a diverse range of challenges and is almost constantly changing. The stronger and more agile you can make your company, the better equipped it is to thrive.

How can you achieve this, though? Well, your focus should be on your employees. You need to give them the skills that are most relevant to the current industry demands and the changes it’s likely to face. Empowering them to forge meaningful bonds with one another, too, creates a more collaborative and engaged workforce. By taking the time to make teams and individual workers more robust, you’ll often find this translates to holistic organizational strength.

Let’s take a moment to explore some of the ways you can practically boost resilience in your teams.

Make Learning a Continuous Process

When we talk about how learning helps to build resilient teams, we’re not just referring to initial training. Rather, you need to take a consistent long-term approach to have the best impact. They may be a significant investment, but continuous education programs offer multiple benefits to your business.

Firstly, demonstrating your commitment to developing staff is an attractive prospect that draws high-quality workers to your company. Regular education empowers your staff with the most relevant skills to respond to industry changes effectively, too. Each of these qualities tends to be key to team resilience, creating a workforce that is knowledgeable enough to address issues and agile enough to adapt to challenges.

To implement continuous learning, make it part of your company culture. Your approach to this should include:

• HR collaborates with team managers to regularly assess staff and identify opportunities for reskilling and upskilling.
• Make tailored development plans for each member of staff based on the needs of the company and the employee’s individual goals.
• Provide convenient and company-subsidized access to ongoing learning resources, such as e-learning courses and certifications.

Essentially, you want to send the message to your staff that learning is a core part of everyday functioning. Keep conversations around development flowing and provide frequent learning experiences. This helps to keep your staff engaged with and invested in their growth.

Incorporate Team-Building Activities

We’ve all heard the adage that there’s strength in numbers. Yet, it’s not just the amount of skilled staff you have that affects resilience. It’s also the quality of the relationships they have with one another. By creating bonding experiences for your staff, you can increase their appreciation for and understanding of one another. This can lead them to provide mutual support during challenging workplace situations and collaborate more effectively on projects.

This is where team-building activities can be quite powerful tools. They create structured forums in which your team is focused on spending time together, interacting through practical tasks, and learning about one another. Not to mention that the relaxed and fun atmosphere is a great stress management exercise for everyone involved.

Some of the activities you could consider for team-building events that boost resilience include:

• Trivia nights: These don’t just offer an evening of friendly competition. Team members also get to share their different specialized knowledge areas with their teammates. For additional resilience value, you can incorporate questions that test and enhance workers’ understanding of the company or industry.
• Tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPG): More companies are starting to recognize that hosting TTRPG sessions — with games such as Dungeons & Dragons — holds fantastic value. These are cooperative games that require close collaboration, with teams bonding over their shared imaginative worlds. You can also use these sessions to exercise the creative thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills that are essential to resilience.
• Card games: This is often a cheap, easy-to-learn alternative to any team-building exercise. Without realizing it, employees can build their people skills, organization, and prioritization skills in a variety of group card games.

Wherever possible, try to avoid creating situations in which your team members only bond with their immediate colleagues. Create cross-departmental collaborations. You really want to try to encourage and strengthen company-wide relationships that make for a more holistically resilient organization. Not to mention that this can break down organizational silos that so often prove problematic.

Utilize Mentorship Schemes

When you’re trying to create more resilient teams, mentorship schemes are something of a double threat. They combine the potential for strong bonding with continuous learning opportunities. When you use it effectively, these programs enable mentors to pass on nuanced professional knowledge and gain more diverse perspectives from their mentees in return. Not to mention that the time these colleagues spend with one another, sharing experiences and challenges, can develop into positive relationships that feed into the culture of your business.

Creating a formal mentorship scheme involves taking the time to assess members of staff. Aim to match colleagues with compatible personalities. You should also consider which mentors can address mentees’ specific knowledge gaps or help meet mentees’ career goals. Don’t just look for the most traditionally high-achieving mentors, though. Remember that those who have faced challenges and turned their struggles into successes have invaluable insights to share. Invest in giving these pairings regular time and space so they can develop meaningful relationships.

Bear in mind that being a great mentor may require some additional training. Arrange for your mentors to attend in-person or online courses. In some circumstances, it can be a smart move to build mentorship experience into your hiring priorities. American Recruiters’ direct hire service can help you identify professionals with the most relevant experience and facilitate their becoming an asset to your organization.

Conclusion

An educated and close workforce tends to make a more resilient company. These qualities don’t just happen, though. You need to invest resources into formal programs that empower teams to learn continuously, have fun with one another, and share both knowledge and experience. Remember, though, that each team is different. You should take the time to regularly assess what programs your employees respond positively to and what the hurdles to engagement are. You can then tailor your approach to have the most powerful impact.