Resilience is the capacity to overcome adversity and adapt positively to challenges or setbacks. Resilience enables us to achieve objectives and high levels of wellbeing.

On a personal level, it is about having the skills and mindset to thrive and flourish during difficult times. As the positive psychologist Chris Peterson described it very simply, its about being able to ‘struggle well’.  Resilience is not about letting difficulties slide off you like teflon – its about facing up to challenges and move through them, learning and growing along the way.

On an organisational level, its about the capacity to adapt positively to difficult situations, having the people, systems and support in place to respond quickly and ‘bend not break’.

Resilience is the ability to navigate challenges and grow stronger from the experience.  In other words, bouncing back better.

Being resilient does not mean that people don’t experience stress, emotional upheaval and suffering. They simply have the skills and tools to respond effectively and minimise the impact on their wellbeing. Some people equate resilience with mental toughness or letting difficult events slide off you like teflon, but demonstrating resilience includes working through emotional pain, struggling and saying no when needed.

Resilience is not a trampoline, where you’re down one moment and up the next. It’s more like climbing a mountain without a trail map. It takes time, strength, and help from people around you, and you’ll likely experience setbacks along the way. But eventually you reach the top and look back at how far you’ve come.

Stress is a precondition for resilience – in other words, we need resilience when we are stressed. We also build resilience through times of stress as we learn from those experiences.

To a certain degree, stress is good as it energises us and uplifts our performance. It also brings teams together. However, undue stress or stress that accumulates over time without proper recovery can lead to burnout.

Resilience is the antidote to burnout.

On an individual level, resilience is important because it gives people the strength needed to process and overcome hardship. Those lacking resilience can easily get overwhelmed, often turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms and can become withdrawn or burnt out.  Resilient people tap into their strengths and support systems to overcome challenges and work through problems. 

For teams and organisations, collective resilience enables the business to respond to and recover quickly from adverse situations, coming back stronger and faster than the competition. Research shows that resilience drives performance, engagement, retention, innovation and customer satisfaction as some examples.  

More compelling for organisations is the cost of inaction.  Having employees who are burning out, thinking rigidly, feeling anxious, overwhelmed and exhausted is not a recipe for productivity. Recent data from a Deloitte study in 2020 shows a significant rise in ‘presenteeism’ and estimates the cost of poor mental health to UK businesses £45 billion per year. Organisations must also consider the incredibly damaging impact on their brand of a suicide, rogue employee and other disastrous lapses in employee judgement that hit the headlines.

Senior leadership sponsorship and involvement. There needs to be visible endorsement right up to Board level.

The warning signs of burnout often go unrecognised until a serious problem or crisis. Therefore a proper assessment can raise awareness, bringing issues to the surface and stimulate early action. Furthermore, stress is personal, affecting everyone differently so a rigorous analysis enables us to pinpoint symptoms as a basis for focused improvement plans.

Yes, absolutely. AURA has been implemented in more than 10 countries, across Asia Pacific and Europe. AURA measures signs of resilience and symptoms of stress which can manifest in individuals.  Like diagnosing a medical condition, the symptoms to look for remain the same. What may differ is across cultures is the level of disclosure – some may skew their responses more positively for fear of showing weakness. Participants are always assured of full confidentiality which can help with this. AURA also has country specific benchmarks to enable relevant calibration.  From implementations to date, we have found that cultures where there is low ‘psychological safety’ i.e. people are unwilling to share their difficulties or fears, disclosure via a confidential questionnaire such as AURA is a welcome and more effective communication channel.

The AURA assessment tool is designed to be used at scale in organisations as a data driven tool to manage resilience on an ongoing basis. However, a good way to start is with a pilot project, focusing on one segment of a business, region or target population where there may have a specific need for resilience . 

There are 3 main ways to address this;

1. Reducing the stigma through awareness campaigns such as #This is me where people share personal stories of mental health challenges
2. Training managers in having open conversations around sensitive or difficult issues – giving them practical tools and a language to initiate such discussions
3. Confidential questionnaires like AURA are a safe way of surfacing issues. Implemented in the right way, many employees especially in Asian cultures feel more comfortable disclosing in this way as opposed to a direct conversation.

The AURA assessment provides a simple index of resilience which is calibrated against a relevant group.  This can provide a baseline for tracking improvement. Other metrics are engagement survey results, wellbeing surveys, customer feedback and more open conversations around issues.   

This has to come from senior leadership.

Awareness campaigns focused on personal stories of leaders or employees who have sought support, recovered from mental health issues without it affecting their career path.