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How does strong teamwork succeed? Certainly, mutual trust between team members, respectful interaction, fairness, credibility and pride in what we have achieved together are a fundamental basis. In view of the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world (see VUCA world) in which we live, more is needed. In order to successfully implement projects as a team, employees need psychological security - they need to be resilient.
What is resilience?
In general, resilience is understood to mean psychological resistance. In the context of teamwork, resilience shows the ability to recover from failures in projects that result from declines in performance and setbacks. It sounds complicated, but it can be simplified using an example: a team is resilient if it can achieve its goal and successfully implement the project despite the absence of a team member - for example due to illness or conflict. This is because it compensates for the absence of the member by adapting the roles and functions of the other members. Non-resilient teams are unable to compensate for this.
How resilience is increased
But how do teams create or increase their resilience? Stoverink, Kirkman, Mistry and Rosen have developed a theoretical model on precisely this topic in their scientific article. In it, they describe the components that make up the resilience of teams.
The first component, "Team Potency", describes the confidence of the members of a good team performance. The second component, the "Team mental model of teamwork", is about the team members' shared and organized understanding of relevant knowledge regarding teamwork and team performance. The third component, "Team capacity to improvise", is about the team's ability to improvise in unforeseen situations. And the fourth and final component for resilience in teams is "team psychological safety".
The Aristotle study by Google also shows how important this psychological safety is in the workplace. If employees do not feel psychologically safe in the workplace, the evolutionary fight-or-flight function in the brain is activated under stress, pressure and challenge, which saves us in life-threatening situations - but switches off the logic in the brain in everyday working life and makes strategic decisions impossible.
Strengthening psychological safety in the workplace
However, in the VUCA world, strategic decisions also have to be made at ever shorter notice in operational terms. For this reason, psychological safety as part of resilience is examined in greater depth below. In order to strengthen psychological safety - and thus resilience - the focus must be on reducing stress and strengthening the well-being of employees. However, the responsibility for this lies neither exclusively with the employer nor exclusively with the employee. It is clear, however, that the psychological safety of employers who have been recognized as a Great Place to Work is 33% higher than that of employers who have not.
To improve wellbeing in the workplace, it is important that each individual takes responsibility for their own wellbeing: speaking up and introducing change in key areas. Organizations need to create an environment where line managers and colleagues actively listen and where everyone can talk about their problems.
In our Europe-wide study, we surveyed over 900 companies on managers' views on stress issues and wellbeing practices.
It suggests that the two main triggers for work-related stress are constant pressure and long working hours. Over half of the European companies surveyed have introduced support measures, but stress is only measured in around a quarter of companies. However, the prevailing approach is that prevention is important, e.g. by ensuring the quality and quantity of resources and by keeping work demands at a reasonable level. The challenge for all companies is to be proactive rather than reactive.
But it's not just about stress. Chronic stress must be tackled at the outset, but the longer-term measures lie in strengthening well-being and resilience, which enables employees to succeed under pressure. A culture of trust, transparency and authentic two-way communication will help. And health and wellbeing practices are a good addition along the way.
In our survey, the biggest differences between non-award-winning companies and the Best Workplaces™ lie in employee perceptions. In other words, the extent to which managers show an honest and personal interest in employees. And the extent to which employees are involved in decisions that affect them. This shows how important it is for employees to feel like a human being and not just a small cog in a machine. The fact is that values and ethics are an important factor in well-being in the workplace; people need respect, justice and fundamental fairness.
As work affects people's wellbeing and wellbeing is essential for business success in the long term, protecting the health and wellbeing of employees must be a priority for all companies. Not only is it the right thing to do from an ethical perspective, but it also enhances the day-to-day employee experience as a differentiating factor of particularly attractive places to work and ensures sustainable employee productivity.
