5 techniques for adapting to change

Business Resilience

As teams move to a more dynamic workforce; more part-time, casual or dynamic hours have made engaging team members even harder. In this article, we will outline 5 easy techniques to use, and steps you can take to build business resilience.

1. Dialogue
2. Engagement
3. Autonomy
4. Safety Plan
5. Mental Health Plan

Dialogue

The very first thing a workplace can do to create business resilience is to engage their employees and team members in dialogue. If you are unsure how to create engaging practices, or are unsure of how to help your team then ask them. Create an open dialogue for people to contribute their opinions, ideas, and suggestions. When people feel like their insight is capable of making a difference they are driven to be engaged in workplace culture.

Schedule a team meeting aimed at taking suggestions, opinions, and ideas about how to create purpose, satisfaction, and engagement in the workplace.

Engagement

Find out from your teams what you can do as a manager, employer, or leader to improve their experience at your workplace. Building business resilience is about maintaining a work environment where the members of that environment feel a sense of belonging, purpose, presence, and accountability. Perhaps your team would like to have a monthly social, or an office competition. Think about what you would like higher levels of engagement to achieve. Is it communication, friendship, autonomy, or a sense of belonging. Simply having their ideas heard and seeing them manifest can create the sense that ideas and suggestions can make positive changes in the immediate environment.

Find out directly from your team how they would like to be engaged, and what you would like engagement to achieve. Create the activity or experience and facilitate it with your team. 

Autonomy

Business resilience is about being able to adapt to changes without interfering too heavily with the client or customer experience. Therefore a resilient business is capable of reacting quickly to sudden changes in staffing. Having a team that is capable of sharing duties and being flexible with the work will be able to shift their priorities in the case of a sudden absentee. Be cautious about having tasks only completable by one individual in the team. A resilient team is like a resilient organism. It is able to deploy help to the injured area. While it may take more time training a team to be multiskilled, it saves money, time, and stress down the line. Like when the only qualified team member has to deliver a deadline and is sick. Having a multiskilled team will help foster a sense of autonomy on that team as they can flex and adapt to the needs of one another.

Train your team to be multiskilled in case of surprises and unexpected incidents.

Safety Plan

Reflect on a semi-regular basis about how you are achieving, maintaining, or falling behind on your goals and outcomes. In this reflective period make sure you allow time to develop, build, and improve your safety plan. COVID has shown us that a massive shift in livelihood can be just around the corner and we won’t even know it. What steps do you have in place, or need to take, to be able to adapt to a massive but sudden change. Reflect on how you were able to adapt and how you were not able to during COVID.

Reflect on the past 6 months and write out a business safety plan to make adapting to sudden changes easier.

Mental Health Plan

Using all of the steps above also outline your business’, team’s, and workplace’s mental health plan. This can be as simple as researching and downloading a Mental Health First Aid Kit, or using the resources at Head2Health  Mental health plans are not only important, they’re good for business. Employees that enjoy their work environment tend to utilise their talent more often, and because they feel valued are less likely to find work elsewhere. Invest in a mental health plan and allow space for a mental health aware workplace.

Create a mental health first aid kit and explain to your team how to use it, when, and why.

Create Culture

The above 5 activities, goals, and experiences can help create a culture that includes the ideas, feelings, and opinions of your employees or team. When members of a group feel included, engaged, respected, trusted and heard then positive behaviours are rewarded. When we are validated for speaking our mind we are more likely to work well within a team environment. When we feel trusted and accountable it means we are capable of adapting to changes from the perspective of achieving a group goal more than a personal one. 

Teams that are connected and engaged can weather sudden changes with more resilience and flexibility then highly siloed workplaces. Make hay while the sun shines and then band together during the harsher climates. 

Connect Remotely

If you’re trying to maintain a team environment or foster connections between remote workers be sure to check out our remote team experience here.