Energy Hacks for Building a Resilient Workplace Culture: Part Five
2 hacks for harnessing ‘feeling’ energy
Resilient workplace cultures are the hallmark of KeepWell Mark accredited organisations. There are five types of energy that such workplaces harness: ‘physical’, ‘thinking’, ‘doing’, ‘relating’ and ‘feeling’. Brainstorming ways to do so is a core part of the building resilience worksop I run for Ibec. I have shared hacks for harnessing physical, thinking, doing and ‘relating’ energy in previous posts. In this final post of the series, I share ways to embed ‘feeling’ (aka ’emotional’) energy.
What is feeling energy?
Feeling energy is ’emotional energy’. Positive emotional energy drawn from positive experiences is productive. Negative emotional energy is draining. And, as I may have mentioned once or twice in previous posts, energy begets energy. So, finding ways to keep your employees on a positive path in terms of emotions is vital to building resilience.
Luckily, if you have taken all of the other steps to harnessing physical, thinking, doing and relating energy, you already have the makings of a resilient workplace. It will be much easier to support employees to harness positive emotional energy when the need arises.
Here are my top two hacks for embedding feeling energy into your workplace.
Hack 1: To build a resilient workplace culture, you can encourage your employees to play to their strengths and be their best possible selfs
People feel energised when they play to their strengths. By that, I mean doing the stuff that they are good at and that they enjoy.
Here are just some of the benefits of focussing on your employees’ strengths:
- It gives people a sense of who they are at their best
- Individuals and teams perform at their best when they focus on their strengths, rather than on improving areas of weakness
- People feel motivated
- Confidence grows
- It drives collaboration in ways that improve individual, team and workplace productivity and performance.
In order to play to their strengths though, people need to understand what they are. They also need to understand what their colleagues strengths are. There are many online assessment tools for analysing people’s strengths. These include the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology’s (CAPP’s) StrengthsFinder, Gallup’s CliftonStrengths and Strengths Partnership’s Strengthscope. It’s worth comparing the benefits of each and their relevance to your sector. They all come at a cost and usually as part of a wider consultancy practice. Do consider The VIA Survey too though, it’s scientifically credible and free!
Once people are aware of their strengths, discussing how they can use them (and those of their team members) to get back on the positive path if they hit an obstacle is really helpful.
For example, if one of their strengths is creativity, can they use this strength to help them over the current situation? Or, do they have a colleague who has empathy or critical thinking strengths (preferably both) who can help them explore ways out of their current mindset?
Encouraging employees to pretend to be happy or strong when they are not though, is not sustainable. Although there are times when ‘acting as if’ gets us through, we all need to be given the headspace to recover from emotional set backs from time to time. At the elbowroom and the elbowroom escape, we allow our employees to take two duvet days if they feel that overwhelm is approaching. We give them permission to just rest, recover and restart. Which leads me to my second hack…
Hack 2: To build a resilient workplace culture, you can encourage employees to take time out to rest and recover
“Human beings are not computers. We’re not meant to run at high speeds, continuously, for long periods of time. Science tells us we’re at our best when we move rhythmically between spending and renewing energy — a reality that companies must embrace to fuel sustainable engagement and high performance.”
This is an abstract from a rather wonderful book I encourage you to read – The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz.
It is partly inspired by this book that I chose to allow my teams members to take two duvet days when they feel overwhelm approaching. Luckily, this does not happen very often as we have such positive practices in place that we’re a resilient lot. However, knowing the support to do so is there means a lot to them, or so they tell me. If anyone does take advantage of this policy though, I also ask them to consider completing a reflective exercise during their time out. This is an exercise we share in our resilience workshop.
Why use the elbowroom escape to run your resilience training?
“Resilience workshop?” I hear you ask.
Yes, as well as providing the perfect venue for resilience training and other offsite corporate training events, we facilitate a range of courses.
And why not? We’re not new to the wellness business. We’ve been working in it wellness business for 16 years now. We’ve invested in bringing our service to over 25,0000 people since the beginning of the century and our corporate clients come from every sector imaginable.
We have trained thousands of well-being instructors, who are available nationwide to deliver solutions at your own premises, in our urban city centre location, or for the upmost in luxury and stunning scenery at our Wicklow mountain lodge, The elbowroom escape.
Further details are coming soon. Please do get in contact though if you just can’t wait to find out more!
- Find out more about our tried and tested packages you can tailor to create your own team building activities and team-building experiences here
- Watch a short video about our unique team building venue here.
- Get in touch here.
