Like many industry buzzwords, the idea of resilience has been put to the test over the last twelve months, as the Covid-19 pandemic caused sudden and huge change across the world.

Within our own business, the pandemic saw many people take on additional responsibility and placed high demands on our colleagues at every level, asking them to respond in different ways in times of unprecedented uncertainty. Across the board, colleagues rose to the challenge, thanks in no small part to our focus on embedding resilience within the organisation as a whole, in teams and individually.

To be successful, resilience must be a long-term target; it takes constant effort with a holistic focus from leaders to ensure the business and its employees are able to weather any storm.

Nurturing personal resilience
As leaders we are responsible for creating an environment in which colleagues are able to focus on their own personal resilience. This has always been important but now even more so as the challenges of the pandemic placed everyone in hugely unfamiliar situations. Leading by example is particularly important when it comes to encouraging positive behaviours that strengthen personal resilience, and it has been no different over the last twelve months.

Throughout my career I have found having a network of “friends at work” has been vital to my wellbeing, providing an outlet to discuss matters that my own family members can’t be expected to fully understand. Recognising this, we facilitate and encourage colleagues to build relationships with their peers, providing them with an informal, trusting and confidential relationship that can be hugely supportive.

I also believe that maintaining a positive mindset is important for personal resilience.  I am fortunate and have always been a ‘glass half full’ person, but finding techniques to look for the positives, focus on what can be achieved and remain upbeat is critical to both personal and team resilience.

While we’re always focused on delivering exceptional service to our customers, it’s good to remind people to not take things too seriously and to keep a sense of perspective, protecting time to think about non-work matters. Likewise, it’s essential to recognise that even in the busiest of times taking a break should be non-negotiable. Whether that’s making sure to not book back-to-back sessions or getting out for a short walk every day, taking time away from work during the day allows time to recharge our batteries, reflect and come back ready to tackle the next challenge.

Finally, I encourage colleagues to develop their own techniques to help with building confidence and job satisfaction. For example, encouraging solutions-orientated behaviours and giving training in how to break down and manage tasks can be a great way of helping get things done, but it also builds a great sense of achievement. I know from personal experience that something as simple as writing a realistic and achievable list every day is an incredibly rewarding and confidence-giving way to structure the day, and it’s something we actively support.

Building resilient teams
The most critical aspect of building sustainable and long-term resilience into a team is establishing strong foundations. It is essential to recognise that a team is more than the sum of its individual parts, but time and energy needs to be dedicated to fostering these bonds. We have recognised the importance of effective team development and as part of our cultural change program and we have been running intensive sessions focussing on individual and team strengths and development areas. From my own perspective, I am convinced that the investment we made as an HR team in 2019 at two offsite events, where we rented self-catering accommodation in the countryside and cooked for one another, helped give us a solid base and genuine bonds that enabled us to manage the challenges thrown at us by 2020.

Once these strong foundations are in place, leaders that are able to build on that trust created in the team will see it really strengthen overall resilience. For us, trust meant creating open and honest channels of communication and encouraging colleagues to share as much as they felt comfortable doing. During the first lockdown last year we set up 30-minute check-in calls each week within the HR teams, in which work matters were strictly off-topic and the senior leadership actively participated, sharing their own challenges and frustrations. We found that giving people the ability and space to share their home and personal challenges created a much more open and supportive team environment, and has been hugely beneficial in strengthening the team’s resilience.

Similarly, increasing the frequency of communication can be a great for team resilience. Particularly for those used to the office setting, the sudden shift to full-time working at home could have been quite isolating, so we made sure we created lots of opportunities for the team to meet virtually, both formally and informally. While this increase in frequency was in response to the pandemic, it has shown us that regular communication is incredibly beneficial, and we will be focussing on embedding new forums for conversation into the team as our working world continues to evolve.

Finally, trust and resilience are both strengthened when a team has clear goals that everyone can work towards, but ones that are also flexible to account for uncertainty and change. Throughout the pandemic we encouraged those in leadership positions to remain agile and actively reprioritise goals and objectives based on feedback from their teams and the business as a whole, which meant that we were able to stay focussed on supporting our customers where it really mattered as things continued to change.

There is no ‘one size fits all approach’ to building resilience, and the techniques that will be most appropriate will vary from team to team. However, it’s clear from the last year that making resilience a real priority, not just industry jargon, is paramount. Ultimately, building individual and team resilience will help with the overall business resilience, ensuring happy and healthy colleagues are able to drive the business forward and support customers, regardless of the challenges they face.