2023 is not just another year of disruption; it’s a year full of conflicting signals. A year in which those of us responsible for developing workforce capabilities must play offense and defense at the same time. Organizations aim to stay agile while upskilling and reskilling the critical talent needed to take advantage of change. There are concerns about productivity due to a remote/hybrid digital workplace, and at the same time our organizations and people are leveraging the transformative potential of resilience and the flexibility it affords.
While resilience has become today’s buzzword, sometimes used interchangeably with determination and grit, it’s much more than that. The World Economic Forum defines resilience as the ability to deal with adversity, withstand shocks and continuously adapt and accelerate as disruptions and crises arise. Fortunately, resilience is measurable, learnable and can be trained at scale using digital tools, including interactive lessons, activities and readings — all designed to create new habits and ways of thinking.
It’s no longer enough to provide employees with skills that merely help them perform in a structured, familiar situation. Now it’s essential to develop the skills for a world and a workplace of challenge and disruption. In a groundbreaking global study, McKinsey identified three of the four key skill areas critical to employment and job satisfaction as the nature of work continues to transform the foundational skills of resilience: cognitive, interpersonal and self-leadership skills, with the fourth being digital technical skills.
While The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report identified that resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility are among the top five in-demand skills by employers, today most companies were not including resilience skill building in their reskilling and upskilling programs. This puts employees at a disadvantage in building an agile, adaptive culture. Our proprietary research at meQuilibrium has found that people with low resilience are 32 percent less likely to engage in training and skill improvement to enhance their performance than those with the highest resilience who are more likely to proactively find training opportunities and improve their skills.
For global enterprises, providing consistent global benefits worldwide has become a priority. Research from McKinsey and the WEF have shown that upskilling and reskilling needs of the global workforce are generally similar across countries, but activating workforces to learn new skills and methods needs to take cultural dynamics into account to drive participation.
In this new work environment, managers have never been more critical for the functioning of teams across diverse worksites – remote, hybrid and on-site. Our research has confirmed that managers with resilience skills are pivotal to creating psychological safety and a team’s ability to innovate through change – while significantly reducing turnover.
Here are three important ways L&D professionals can build the foundations for a global workforce ready for growth in the new world of work:
- Build adaptive capacity and openness to learning: Train for core cognitive resilience skills
The cognitive skills of resilience teach people to achieve emotion control, self-confidence, problem solving and positivity, all of which are foundational to adaptability, agility and openness to learning.
Fortunately, resilience is a learnable skill. Digitized resilience is relevant and accessible to global workforces and has proven to be learnable with improvements benefiting from the “dosing effect,” meaning that improvement in resilience is commensurate with time spent learning.
In work published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, meQ’s research team showed resilience skill-building’s “dosing effect.” For the 600 randomly selected participants, correlation was nearly linear: time spent training led to markedly improved resilience levels, perceived stress levels and reduced somatic (physical) symptoms of stress.
Our research shows highly resilient people are more likely to proactively seek training opportunities, improve their skills and volunteer for new assignments and tasks. On the other hand, those with low resilience are 32 percent less likely to be open to learning.
- Create a consistent global learning strategy with cultural awareness: Be aware of global differences and the keys within culture that drive participation.
Deep-rooted cultural differences play a significant role in shaping attitudes toward many of the programs offered by employers. Culture has a powerful influence on our beliefs about the relative importance of individual vs. group accomplishment. Culture even impacts our degree of openness to new experiences. Maximizing the reach and impact of digital learning tools requires a thorough understanding of the cultural landscape that colors individuals’ attitudes and beliefs. For example:
Pay attention to how culture impacts identity, openness to new experiences, and receptivity to new ideas:
- Use communications that provide the appropriate cultural context, make clear how engaging with the program fits into the culture’s social fabric and align with how employees in different cultures will respond to new programming.
- Identify locally respected sponsors to endorse programs.
Local champions are the key to encouraging action and building trust and stickiness. Our research has found that local champions are 40 percent more effective at driving enrollment and 70 percent more effective at long-term engagement than regional or global sponsors.
3. Think differently about upskilling and caring for managers.
Effective managers remain pivotal to retention, burnout risk, trust in management and more. The evidence for the pivotal nature of managers for an array of business outcomes continues to mount. Good managers who provide psychological safety have reduced burnout risk by 50 percent and amplified trust in the company. Managers who demonstrate resilience can reduce turnover risk by as much as 78 percent. Despite – or perhaps due to – their pivotal role, managers are often at higher risk for poor outcomes than the employees they lead.
Our data shows that managers report higher levels of stress-related productivity impairment, burnout and turnover risk compared to non-managers. All of this means they may be less adaptive and less open to learning and responding to change positively.
Reminding managers to put on their own “oxygen mask” first is an important step, but given the additional duties most managers have taken on, this is often easier said than done. It is necessary to refresh and enlarge our concept of leadership training to emphasize the necessity of leading by modeling resilience while also maintaining one’s own resilience.
Resiliency matters
Resilient employees know how to identify and correct unproductive thinking patterns to face problems, yet at the same time, remain optimistic. They accelerate as disruptions and crises arise over time. Resilience is the solution for building an engaged and thriving workforce in today’s climate of volatility and disruption. These are the critical skills of the workforce of today and tomorrow.
