Shawnee Love   •  
March 11, 2017

In my experience, an individual’s personal well being sets the foundation for success at work. Because if you feel well, you:

• Are better able to handle the miscellaneous obstacles that crop up through the day,
• Don’t let a stray word or look get to you, and
• Are able to pick yourself up and move on through mistakes, delays, and minor failures.

If you want to build your personal well being or help your staff build theirs, what can you do?

1. Get intentional:  Start by being intentional about what well being is.  The Canadian Mental Health Association has some wonderful resources on resiliency including ideas and suggestions for building mental wellness (personal resilience) into a regular day.  Simple things like journaling, exercising, taking time to each lunch away from the desk, and doing one thing at a time, can be effective at building resilience.  Helping your employees find what works for them and encouraging them to do it are great ways to create resilient employees.

2. Get aware: The CMHA also has a mental health meter, a quiz you can take (or share with your staff) which measures resilience among other aspects of mental health.  Awareness of where a person is at is often a key step in improving.

3. Get committed: As a manager, you can also help build personal wellness by ensuring the work environment, culture, tools and resources are aligned with the concept.

Interesting news on this front (and an example for us all) is that France just made it an employee’s right to disconnect from work.  While we don’t have the same law in Canada (yet?) one way employers can build resilience is to ensure employees know they can disconnect and that it isn’t a career limiting move to have personal time and down time.

Please comment if you have examples of how your organization helps its employees build resiliency.