How to build resilience in a team in six steps

In the workplace, you and your team may have to deal with situations that are stressful, upsetting or challenging. You may need some support yourself or you may need to provide support to others. The impact of stress can be far reaching within a team, whether the cause is work related or not.

Learning how to build resilience in a team helps promote a supportive work environment and equips individuals with the skills to adapt, recover and thrive in the face of challenges and stressful situations. This blog sets out six manageable steps to help build resilience in your team using the CALMER Framework, designed by the British Red Cross Psychosocial and Mental Health team.

Importance of being resilient in the workplace

Stress is a feeling of strain or pressure. Stress can affect how you feel, think and behave as well as how your body works – and this is multiplied when there is stress within a team. Developing your team’s understanding of stress and learning how to build resilience in your team through mental health training can have the following benefits:

• ability to recognise and manage your own stress and better support stress of others
• improve self-awareness and personal resilience
• reduce absenteeism resulting from work-related stress
• learn to adapt well to challenging, stressful or upsetting situations
• build positive relationships between team members.

Step 1: Consider individual reactions and how this might impact the team.

Individuals may all respond differently to the same stressor. Their ability to adapt to challenging situations will depend on their own personal stress level. Some people flourish under pressure whilst others may feel overwhelmed.

It is important to acknowledge individual circumstances and levels of stress within your working environment to better understand how this impacts the team.

Step 2: Acknowledge the effect stress has on the team

When something stressful happens to someone at work it can affect how they think and feel about themselves and how they behave and interact with others.

People in the team may:

• feel stressed / anxious / unsure how to respond
• become withdrawn, short-tempered and less cooperative
• avoid things or people they are having problems with
• have difficulty making decisions or concentrating
• communicate less effectively.

If the team’s ability to work together is impacted this can result in reduced productivity which can also impact on the workload of others, increasing their own level of personal stress.

Step 3: Listen actively and with empathy to your team members

Effective team communication is vital to the success of a team both in its day-to-day role but also when faced with a difficult situation. Good communication makes people feel validated, listened to and respected. It can help boost morale and reduce stress as people don’t feel alone.

Helpful behaviours include:

• asking how they are
• listening with empathy if they want to talk
• acknowledging how they are feeling by validating and normalising experiences
• avoiding the urge to problem solve
• not demonstrating judgement or blame.

Step 4: Manage the situation as it changes

Being part of a team will likely have given you lots of personal experience of how teams/groups deal with stressful times. Unfortunately, we are more likely to focus on what went wrong, without paying enough attention to what went right.

Using Appreciative Inquiry is a useful resilience-building activity which focuses on identifying and doing more of what is working, rather than looking for problems. Remembering how we coped positively to challenging or emotional situations may help us with our approach to further situations.

Step 5: Enable your team by facilitating choice and connections

In some situations, it may be possible to remove the stressor by sharing workload or asking for help from supportive others. However, stress cannot always be eliminated so encouraging people to share problems with other members of the team can help. This may enable an alternative solution to be found or allow the challenge to be viewed from a different perspective. Remember, helping people feel in control can help them to cope better when faced with difficulties such as stress.

Step 6: Resource through information and liaison

Ensure team members are aware of and making use of:

• the skills and experience other team members have
• the formal support networks such as Human Resources (HR) and Employee Assistance Programme (EAP)
• the informal support networks such as peer support groups and supportive others
• taking annual leave
• internal resources such blogs on how to create a positive mindset in your team.

How to build resilience in a team

Supporting your team to better understand stress through resilience training helps your organisation improve team collaboration, and ultimately increases overall productivity and wellbeing.

Our course Building team resilience at work course includes a range of helpful tools and strategies to help improve your team’s ability to withstand and recover from challenges including techniques for managing stress, fostering a positive mindset, improving self-care, developing effective communication skills, and problem-solving approaches.