The productivity and effectiveness of a workplace is built on the success of employees. With increasing demands put on workers, resilience is vital to organizational success. So, what are some lessons learned? What can leaders do to enhance and create more of it?

Working with leaders, we find there are 2 areas that seem to make a difference: 

1. Helping individual employees develop their personal resilience skills. A resilient organization is made of many resilient workers.
2. Adopting workplace strategies to enhance this resilience.

Helping Individuals - Resilient people tend to have a clear sense of who they are and their purpose in life; they are proactive and good at solving problems; they are socially competent and have a well developed support network.  All of this can be developed.  

Resilient organizations show the same qualities - a sense of purpose, a results oriented, "can do" culture, and strong support systems.  To strengthen these organizational qualities, 4 actions make a difference:

• Ensure the organization's purpose and core values are clear - and make them a compelling reality.
• Promote personal initiative - push decision-making  to those closest to the job,  use participative decision-making, give employees as much control over their jobs as skill and experience allow, challenge employees to solve problems.
• Communicate, communicate, communicate - reduce the "not knowing", and ambiguity that fosters stress and anxiety, talk face-to-face as much as possible and allow Q&A, build confidence that leaders "will communicate what's going on when they know it."
• Build a positive, healthy work environment - involve employees, support personal development, give priority to health & safety issues, recognize employees; focus on team development.

Mosaic has just introduced www.mosaiceap.ca a new membership-based, interactive web portal to help business leaders deal effectively and proactively with the impact of mental health issues in the workplace.  Leaders benefit from information, tools, and resources that will help them manage people issues. In addition, the portal provides a wealth of personal and wellness resources for employees, dealing with topics such as anxiety, depression, effective communication, conflict in the workplace and strengthening resilience.  MIN members are invited to participate. Interested? Find out more by contacting either Scott Witmer (switmer@mosaiconline.ca ) or me (kmust@mosaiconline.ca ).