Employees increasingly need Resilience, Adaptability and Creativity

Employees increasingly need Resilience, Adaptability and Creativity

As a result of technological advances and demographic changes, more than six million people in the UK are currently employed in occupations that are likely to change radically or disappear entirely over the next few years. Here are just a few sectors that will be significantly affected. In no particular order …

  • Telemarketing
  • Customer Service
  • Retail Staff
  • Accountancy Roles
  • Till Cashiers and Bank Tellers
  • Logistics
  • Construction
  • Warehousing

A recent labour market report states that employers are looking for individuals with key transferable skills like resilience, adaptability and creativity and these are more important than paper qualifications. For as long as I can remember, employers have voiced concerns that recruits from education are not sufficiently prepared for the world of work. But it’s not just the young. Without the ability to adapt, older workers too, are at risk of becoming trapped in insecure, low-value, low-pay employment – or worse, forced out of work altogether. Here are 10 rules or truths about the world of work.

10 Truths of Hiring and Firing:

  1. Nobody owes you a job
  2. You have to compete to get a job – You need tenacity and creativity. You need resilience.
  3. You need to adapt to keep a job. There are no guarantees. Loyalty, years of service friendships are not enough to keep you in a job.
  4. You may quit your job any time you want to and without any warning to or much notice, leave your employer ‘high and dry’.
  5. Your employer may make you redundant or fire you at any time. They may do this because they can’t afford you, or your job has become obsolete, or the business is collapsing.
  6. If you quit your job you may do everything in your power to help your employer find a suitable replacement – or you may do nothing.
  7. If you are fired or made redundant your employer may do everything in their power to help you find other employment – or they may do nothing.
  8. As you look back you may decide that your employer treated you well and in accordance with their publicly stated values or you may look back and decide they treated you badly and in direct contradiction to their stated values.
  9. If you are the only one to be ‘let go’ you may find that other employees will promise to support you and fight to save your job. On the other hand, they may do nothing at all to help you.
  10. When faced with the need to adapt you may embrace the opportunity to learn new skills or you may choose not to.

Accepting all of the above, you are a rare and unique individual no matter how the world of work treats you. Your worth is not defined simply by your work but by your spirit, your dignity, your compassion towards others and your resilience.

(Adapted from ‘What Colour is Your Parachute?’ Richard Nelson Bolles)

We at Embrace want to hear from organisations about the challenges they face and how online tools can support workers at risk from new technologies or restructuring.

Click here

For organisations that engage with us, we offer two prize draws per year and award the winners with a 6-month subscription package to our support system for their entire workforce free of charge.

Contact Mike Burke 0161 928 9987 or mburke@embraceresilience.com

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Change and Resilience

Adapt or fail. This is the essence of resilience.

The ‘Stages of Change’ is a behaviour change model used widely in psychology and addiction therapies. It has something of real value to offer those wishing to manage change in their own lives and improve their resilience and mental health.

It’s safe to say that Mental Health is now firmly on the agenda for employers of all shapes and sizes. There is quite rightly, a lot of energy going in to promoting messages calling for people to talk more about mental health. However, one of the problems is that talking about mental health all too quickly turns in to talking about mental illness.

The medical model focusses on mental illness and looks for symptoms. It arrives at a diagnosis and then offers treatment options to the patient. In other words, mental illness (such as anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, personality disorder) is treated in much the same way as one might respond to a physical diagnosis.

The psycho-social approach takes a different approach to mental health by focussing not on treatments for an illness, but what can be done by the individual to improve their mental health. This approach is sometimes criticised because it appears to ‘blame’ the individual. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the message of building resilience. It’s not about blaming and it’s not just about the individual. It is about taking responsibility for the choices we make and, when necessary (and possible), to change the environment around us.

Applying what we know about behavioural psychology to promote resilience through change is becoming increasingly popular as a tool to improve mental health, emotional resilience and physical wellbeing.

What is the ‘Stages of Change’ model?

Sometimes referred to as the ‘Cycle of Change’ or the ‘transtheoretical model’, it is a way of understanding behaviour change that was pioneered by two American psychologists James Prochaska and Carlo Di Clemente in their work on mental health and addiction.

The model describes a cycle of change because the stages a person goes through in making changes to their life are often not linear, but cyclical and they often follow a sequence.

The stages of change are identified as:

  1. Pre-contemplation
  2. Contemplation
  3. Preparing to Change
  4. Action
  5. Maintenance
  6. Relapse

Guiding Principles

There are underpinning principles which help to guide the person through the various steps involved in making long term sustainable changes in their life.

  • Be honest in your assessment of yourself
  • Believe in your capacity to change
  • Don’t seek to be ‘happy’. Aim to be authentic
  • Develop your own personal routines.

How does it help you to become more resilient?

The stages of change model underlines the importance of motivation and helps us to adapt our responses to adversity. It emphasises the power we have to make choices and voluntarily expose ourselves to the risks and benefits of change.

One way or another, adversity and change is going to come in to our lives. It is our response to adversity that defines us as resilient or fragile in any situation. Just as talking through our thought processes with a counsellor can be therapeutic, so can writing our thoughts down. The e-learning course offered by Embrace Resilience contains this therapeutic writing dimension which helps to bring clarity and relevance when thinking about change and resilience.

For more information on the Change and Resilience e-learning courses, contact Mike Burke mburke@embraceresilience.com or call 0161 928 9987.

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