SEEKING WELLBEING?

TRAIN YOUR
PEOPLE IN
RESILIENCE
BY GINA BROOKS

Wellbeing and resilience are two sides of the same coin.

Resilience creates the conditions that enable wellbeing to thrive.

So how do we define ‘wellbeing’?

22 TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT | JUNE 2019


The 2018 Wellbeing Lab Workplace
Survey, which was the first of its kind
in Australia, defines it as: ‘our ability
to feel good and function effectively
physically, mentally and socially.’
When we achieve this state, we are
better able to maintain it, regardless
of what life throws at us. It’s not
about thinking positively all the time
but being able to bounce back from
the dark side, so to speak.
Interest in wellbeing
and resilience generally
have both been on a
steady increase in the
past decade and yet
don’t you agree that
it seems easier to talk
about one over the
other?
WELLBEING
PROGRAM OR
RESILIENCE
TRAINING?
When it comes to
workplaces, the Google trends data: Search volume for wellbeing vs
definition of a
‘wellness’ program
depends on who
you ask. On balance though, most
of them focus on employee health.
Program elements range from paying
employees to work out to providing
fresh fruit.
The Wellbeing Lab survey
summarised these wellbeing
programs as ‘The Three Fs’: fruit,
fitness and flu shots. They are tactics
that look good, that serve to attract
talent, but don’t actually shift the
needle. This is because wellbeing is
‘not a solo endeavour’.
The survey presented many reasons
why wellbeing is important. For
example, employees who thrive are:
Your ability to ‘feel good and function effectively physically,
mentally and socially’ is impacted by how well your company
supports your ability to proactively manage your own wellbeing.
6 times more likely to feel engaged
29% more likely to be productive
45% more likely to feel satisfied in
their jobs
46% less likely to have sick or mental
health days
125% less likely to burn out
32% less likely to quit
The good news is that the survey
tells us that Australians are pretty
good at taking control of their own
in Australia since 2004.
wellbeing. Unfortunately, it also tells
us that their workplaces are great at
undermining this capacity.
Your ability to ‘feel good and function
effectively physically, mentally and
socially’ is impacted by how well
your company supports your ability
to proactively manage your own
wellbeing. Pairing resilience training
with a resilient culture — that is, one
in which people are allowed to be
vulnerable, that doesn’t punish them
for seeking support, and that allows
them to express (or manage) their
emotions effectively — is when you
start to see the huge payoffs often
mentioned in wellbeing studies.
GINA BROOKS
Therefore, your challenge as
a learning and development
professional is to help people
become autonomous, competent and
motivated. The easiest way to do
that is to show your people the tools
and techniques that will help and give
them the opportunity to practice with
them.
STEP ONE: MEASURE IT. WE VALUE
WHAT WE MEASURE!
I know that I am
singing to the choir
on this one, but I’m
going to say it anyway:
measure first so you
have a benchmark. This
measurement ought to
occur at a corporate
level AND an individual
level.
First, take a benchmark
of your corporate
outcomes — it is the
only thing that will
help you to prove the
resilience effectiveness of your
training program.
You can use any set
of organisational
outcomes that you feel will best
represent the status of your business.
Some examples include engagement
surveys, retention KPIs, absenteeism
rates, levels of union involvement,
numbers of EAP referrals and so on.
Second, get individuals to complete
a wellbeing self-assessment. It will
allow them to identify their strengths
and areas for potential development.
STEP TWO: LEVERAGE EXISTING
SUPPORT STRATEGIES
It’s likely that you already have the
critical components of a resilience
training program around you. There
are some simple things that you can
23
 G I N A B R O O KS
do to leverage your existing support strategies:
• Get your leaders to complete the program first.
They can then promote it to their teams and provide
context for the training. The leadership’s presence is
a very important signal that everyone has a role to
play in the wellbeing of the business and its people.
• Form a sub-committee whose purpose it is to
establish an action plan for implementing resilience
strategies into the workplace.
• Use all of your communication channels to promote
training. Make your people aware of why your
organisation has chosen to develop resilience, when
and how the training will take place, and how current
policies, processes, and systems will be impacted.
STEP THREE: DESIGN A LEARNING PROGRAM THAT
ALLOWS PEOPLE TO EXPERIMENT
When designing and rolling out a resilience program,
your goal is to focus on the whole person. Aim to build a
structured, facilitated program that is evidence-based
and that uses the principles of positive psychology,
neuroscience and emotional intelligence. What you want
to achieve is a highly interactive and immersive program
that enhances learning and will support long-term,
sustainable behaviour change.
To make it more powerful, customise it to your specific
needs, using real workplace challenges and examples.
This way, you can align the training with the workplace’s
language and values, and the program will enhance the
connection, trust and collaboration with your teams
through work and discussion.
Who you choose to facilitate the sessions is also critical.
In an ideal world, you’ll find a facilitator who is not only
qualified in this space but is also capable of distilling
complex science and delivering it in an engaging and
playful way. Having play as the foundation of the
program will also serve to enhance participants’ positive
emotions, which are essential to good collaboration,
strong engagement and delivering excellent wellbeing and
learning outcomes.
24 TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT | JUNE 2019
Additionally, letting people play with the tools, techniques
and ideas allows them to work out which ones resonate
with them. The idea with resilience training is not to build
capability in one skill, but to let people play with a range
of them. No singular resilience tool or technique will suit
everybody — this is why simply teaching mindfulness, for
example, is an incomplete solution.
Some ideas to get you started:
• Explore tools for living in the now and enjoying the
present moment. Activities ought to be centred
on focus, attention, and mindfulness. These help
participants to gain more emotional management
and feel more engaged.
• Create activities that give participants the
opportunity to practise different ways of expressing
gratitude and appreciation. These two simple things
are deceptively powerful: they increase positive
emotions, they keep people energised and healthy,
and they are a powerful antidote to unproductive
emotions and depression.
• Explore the science of the feel-good chemicals
that our bodies and brains crave and that they use
to create energy. As part of this you can bring in
activities that show participants how to maintain
their energy, how to quickly re-energise themselves
when required and how language can impact their
energy levels.
• Create activities that help your participants to spot
the strengths in others, and to create engaged teams
and cooperative relationships. You can pair these
with any of the previous activities; all of them give
your workforce the ability to reinforce their working
relationships and to collectively become more
effective.
• Include activities and reflections on how attitudes
— either positive or negative — impact you and the
others around you. Help participants to understand
what behavioural drivers influence their attitudes.
This is incredibly helpful for reinforcing ‘circuit
breakers’, especially in difficult or challenging roles
like customer service, because they help participants
to step back from a situation and see how external
factors influence them.

If you are stuck for what to do, a
quick search of the internet will give
you hundreds of ideas for resilience
games and activities. Just remember:
if it’s labelled as being for children,
it doesn’t mean you can’t use it. It
might just be more fun!
STEP FOUR: EMBED THE PRACTICE
If you follow the 70:20:10 model of
learning, you already know that the
sessions themselves are a small part
of training people to be resilient.
The bulk of the benefit comes after
the training, when new skills and
practices are put into action.
This is one of the benefits of bringing
in your leadership early; your leaders
must act as role models and have
open conversations about wellbeing
and resilience. They must be engaged
in talking to your participants about
the strategies that they are using
and how effective they are so that
participants know that their new
skills are being supported. If you have
already equipped your leaders to be
coaches, then you’re off to a flying
start.
Some other ways that you can do
this include:
• Setting up social support
groups or networks. This allows
GINA BROOKS
Gina Brooks is the director of Training x Design and was runner-up for the AITD L&D Professional of the Year
award in 2017. For over 25 years she has been delivering customised learning solutions that leverage the
principles of positive psychology, neuroscience and emotional intelligence to develop high performing, resilient
cultures that maximise the potential of people and the business. Contact via LinkedIn.
your team members to have a
shared language, to share their
knowledge and experiences.
This is incredibly helpful if your
employees work in teams. You
can encourage the team to
develop practices that work for
everybody. A very simple way
of doing this is with a gratitude
board.
• Including resilience in workplace
policies and practices. This
means that everyone, from the
newest employee to the longest
serving, will gradually form
workplace habits built around
resilience. Wellbeing will become
a natural method of functioning
and will stop being something
that people have to think about.
• Making sure that information
is available to your employees
on an ongoing basis. Think
of the ways in which you can
add resilience information or
activities at each of the five
moments of learning: learning
for the first time, learning more,
applying what they’ve learned,
learning when things go wrong
and learning when things
change. Some organisations
have achieved this by creating
mindfulness moments before
every activity.
GINA BROOKS
STEP FIVE: MEASURE AGAIN!
Take another measure of corporate
outcomes and individual wellbeing at
the end of your training — and again
periodically afterwards. Continue
to take measures over the next few
years. If your resilience and wellbeing
program is well designed, connects
all the tools available to your
staff, allows them to practice and
experiment, and is supported by the
business, then you will see dramatic
increases in employee wellbeing.
Research shows that when we
thrive in all areas — physical,
emotional, social, and
psychological — everything
improves: our work improves,
our relationships improve, our
businesses improve. Hopefully
your organisation, too, will see
the benefits of training people
for resilience: fewer safety
incidents, lowered absenteeism,
higher shareholder returns,
higher customer ratings — and
a reputation as a creative and
innovative organisation.
25
Copyright of Training & Development (1839-8561) is the property of Copyright Agency
Limited and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv
without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print,
download, or email articles for individual use.