Resilience is critical to any team’s success – and that is particularly true in the tech and engineering sectors. In addition to rapid technological change, these sectors face high levels of employee burnout, technostress, persistent staffing shortages, and the challenge of effective remote teamwork.
Fostering resiliency is one of the best ways to set your team up for success. And a successful team is the foundation of a successful business. Resilient teams can more easily:
- Adapt to and navigate change;
- Push through to overcome obstacles;
- Persevere to achieve goals;
- Identify opportunities for innovation and success;
- Shoulder accountability as individuals and as a team; and,
- Manage the ongoing shifts and pivots required by today’s businesses.
While building resilient teams takes meaningful thought and action, it’s certainly worth the effort. If you need to encourage resiliency among your employees, here are some strategies to consider.
Address Resilience During The Hiring Process
A blend of specific soft skills is critical to developing individual resilience. Adaptability, problem-solving, teamwork, empathy, and emotional intelligence are all key components of resilience. To foster resilience, it’s important to hire candidates who have the right soft skills.
Start by incorporating the soft skills needed for resiliency into your job descriptions. As well, use language that highlights the importance of resiliency on your team. For instance, include phrases like:
- “Seeks out creative solutions in complex situations”;
- “Remains focused and effective under shifting priorities”; and,
- “Uses problem-solving skills to effectively navigate issues.”
Once you move to the interview phase, it’s important to assess for soft skills. If you use a behavioral interview format, incorporate questions that assess resilience. For example, you could ask candidates to describe a situation where they faced a major challenge in the workplace and how they overcame it. Or, if you use a situational interview format, you could describe a hypothetical situation that requires resiliency and ask how the candidate would manage that situation.
Attract Candidates Who Thrive In Dynamic Environments
Defining your company culture and creating a strong company brand are among the best ways to attract candidates who are a good fit – including those who exhibit resiliency.
Company culture is often described as the “personality” of a business. It includes a company’s values, behaviors, standards, and practices – and it drives the way your business and employees approach everything, from hiring practices to teamwork to retention. If your company culture values resiliency, you will attract resilient candidates.
A employer brand reflects a business’ reputation and how it’s perceived by the people who interact with it – employees, vendors, customers, clients, and the general public. To showcase your commitment to fostering resiliency, your employer brand should reflect values like continuous learning, flexibility, and collaboration.
It’s important to actively shape both your company culture and employer brand so that they are accurate reflections of your company’s values and goals. Additionally, showcasing them in your social media channels, the company’s website, and other communication vehicles ensures that you attract candidates who align with your values and are a good long-term fit.
Optimize Your Onboarding Process For Resiliency
Without the support of a well-structured onboarding program, new hires may struggle to understand their roles and navigate their new workplace, neither of which is conducive to resilience. Conversely, an onboarding process that provides clear expectations, resources, and support can give new hires the tools they need to adapt quickly to challenges and thrive in a dynamic work environment – and ultimately build their resilience.
There are a few critical components of a strong onboarding program. Mentors are one. Pairing new hires with experienced mentors can help them navigate and learn about company culture, workflows, and expectations. As well, mentors can provide critical support, offering the advice and guidance needed for success. This support allows is important to building resiliency.
Structured learning paths, introduced during onboarding, are also key in building resilience. As new hires work through structured training, they build confidence in their work and learn new ways to adapt. By taking things one step further and actively encouraging new hires to approach challenges with a growth mindset, you empower them to learn and innovate, both of which are critical to building resilience.
Finally, establishing and communicating realistic expectations to new hires during onboarding minimizes their stress and uncertainty. And, through regular check-ins, managers and team leads can provide constructive feedback and reassurance about meeting those expectations. Check-ins can also help employees navigate setbacks and learn ways to improve. All of these actions contribute to building resiliency.
Foster A Culture Of Psychological Safety
Resiliency flourishes when employees feel a sense of psychological safety around sharing innovative ideas, taking risks, making mistakes, and voicing concerns without fear of negative repercussions. A lack of psychological safety, on the other hand, can stifle creativity, innovation, and collaboration since employees may hesitate to speak up or experiment.
One of the most effective ways to cultivate psychological safety is through strong leadership. When leaders are openly transparent about their challenges and the lessons they’ve learned, it empowers employees to be innovative and creative in the ways they meet their own challenges.
Psychological safety can also be reinforced through structured feedback loops. Create safe spaces – online or in person – where employees can share their concerns and collaboratively work on solutions. While some may feel safer providing anonymous feedback, recognizing employees who share valuable ideas and insights can encourage others to tap into their resiliency to share their thoughts more openly.
When employees see that their input is valued and mistakes are considered learning opportunities rather than failures, their resiliency deepens, making it easier for them to adapt to and address challenges.
Provide Opportunities For Continuous Learning
Continuous learning – especially in the tech and engineering fields – is critical in building resiliency. Confidence in adopting and incorporating emerging technologies requires knowledge.
While keeping up-to-date about emerging technologies is critical, all knowledge supports employee growth and reinforces resilience. Encourage your employees to seek out learning opportunities by:
- Offering tuition support or stipends for industry-related certifications;
- Establishing structured cross-functional training and job rotations; and,
- Providing support to attend workshops, conferences, and networking events.
Offering opportunities for continuous learning not only bolsters resiliency in employees but also provides several benefits for employers. Learning opportunities often lead to increased productivity, innovation, engagement, collaboration, job satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. Additionally, employers who support learning are investing in employees and their success – and this is attractive to job candidates.
Promote A Healthy Work/Life Balance
A healthy work/life balance is critical in helping employees retain their resilience. If workers are feeling stressed, overworked, or burned out, their resilience will falter.
There are several ways that companies can support a healthy work/life balance for their employees. Perhaps the most effective way is offering flexible work arrangements, whether allowing remote or hybrid options or flex time.
Additionally, providing access to mental health resources, wellness programs, and stress-management tools supports resiliency in a direct and real way. It also makes employees feel valued as people, beyond what they do on the job, and that too contributes to resiliency.
Finally, team leaders and managers should regularly assess workloads and ensure that tasks are distributed fairly across teams. By encouraging frank discussion about workload challenges, and taking action to address those challenges, leaders can help employees feel supported.
Recognize And Reward Resilience
Recognizing and rewarding resilience is a terrific way to show your employees that you value that trait in them. When workers see your appreciation, they will likely keep striving to improve their resiliency.
There are several different ways to celebrate resiliency. Choose one that best reflects your company culture. Some suggestions include:
- Peer recognition, which will celebrate resiliency while also building a culture of appreciation;
- Public recognition through channels such as shoutouts, mentions in newsletters, and employee profiles on your company’s social channels and website; and,
- Tangible rewards such as gifts, bonuses, or even promotions.
Keep in mind that some employees may appreciate quiet acknowledgment from leadership while others thrive on public appreciation. Regardless of the method, consistently celebrating resilience helps build a workplace culture where employees feel supported, valued, and motivated to keep meeting challenges.
Don’t forget to celebrate team resiliency in addition to the resiliency of individual employees. Whether recognizing and rewarding teams or individuals, highlighting accomplishments achieved through resiliency helps to cultivate engagement, motivation, and loyalty.
Retain Resilient Talent
Resilient employees are valuable and should be encouraged to stay with your organization. One of the best retention strategies is offering opportunities for growth and advancement within the company. Employees are more likely to stay and contribute over the long term when they see growth potential in the workplace.
But, as ideal as it is, internal mobility doesn’t just happen. Fostering internal mobility takes effort and may require a major shift in your company culture. If you don’t already do so, you should consider:
- Meeting with employees to audit their existing skills;
- Empowering managers to recommend and initiate employee movement;
- Supporting cross-functional work;
- Offering leadership training;
- Creating reskilling and upskilling programs; and
- Implementing a robust internal recruitment process.
Building and maintaining resilient tech and engineering teams requires a strategic approach that begins with a well-crafted job description and extends through an employee’s entire tenure with your company. It can take meaningful thought and effort to encourage resiliency but the payoff is enormous for your employees and your company at large.
