In February 2020, the business body Resilience First issued its guidance on Emotional Resilience. With an estimated one in four people suffering some form of mental ill-health at some point, emotional resilience helps to manage stress and prevents the emergence of ill-health. The 2020 guidance reflected on the best practices that business communities could adopt to improve the emotional resilience of their employees in advance of, and after, a traumatic experience at work.
Resilience First with KRTS International Ltd is now producing a follow-up. Emotional Resilience – Lessons from the real world: A practical guide after crises and major incidents is a practical demonstration for businesses on implementing emotional resilience using real-life examples. With a section on lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic, the report highlights the need for employers to:
a. use a three-pronged Resilience, Resistance, Recovery model to determine strengths or weaknesses in an overall plan;
b. combine proactive and responsive control measures that can mitigate the risks for all these areas;
c. avoid offering ‘counselling or nothing’. Most people will need something in between.
The report explains that simply signposting employees to support isn’t enough and goes through the methods that employers need to implement to provide the emotional resilience necessary for those faced by stressful and traumatic experience at their workplace.
Dr Liz Royle at KRTS International Ltd is lead author of the report. She said: “In my 25 plus years working at the coalface of traumatic incidents, I have seen organisations manage the impact of them really well … and really badly. When it’s the latter case, the negative impact of a traumatic event has the potential to rip through an organisations’ resilience, affecting the business, its employees, their families and rippling right into the fabric of our communities. The white paper takes a fresh look at best practice, what is working and what isn’t – for all involved – and aims to provide practical, real-world recommendations so that more organisations manage the impact better.”
John Deverell CBE is founder of The Prepared Mind (www.thepreparedmind.net) and is an Advisory Board Member of Resilience First. He wrote in a foreword: ‘Dr Royle points out that poor mental health pre-Covid-19 cost UK employers approximately £45 billion annually. Because of the pandemic, the statistics are now even worse. It is, therefore, incumbent on employers to read and adopt the recommendations that she sets out in this paper. They will thus develop both their own and their subordinates’ leadership capabilities and, by helping their employees to become more resilient, will enable better and more successful business.’
Robert Hall at Resilience First is editor of the report. He said: “This second guide on the topic of Emotional Resilience is a mark of the importance we attach to the subject, and one we think many business users will find valuable, particularly as we emerge from the pandemic. One recent survey has highlighted the fact that organisations worldwide are set to increase investment in employee health as they see it affecting productivity while another survey has indicated that two in five employees would stay if their employer demonstrated more care for their mental wellbeing. There are two reasons to read and apply this guide.”
