Building a healthy workplace is a win-win situation for both employers and employees, but it can be a challenge to create an environment that truly supports mental health and builds resilience.

Research proves that investing in your people’s wellbeing is beneficial to both them and the business. So, how can you build resilience in the wider workplace, support employee wellbeing, and build an open and supportive company culture?

How to build a resilient workplace
Resilience relies on giving people opportunities to build the knowledge, skills, and capabilities to really thrive at work as well as being able to respond effectively to stress, challenges, and change. Making wellbeing a part of the day-to-day work culture is multi-faceted and takes individual and combined effort. Here are some key components:

• Lead by example - look after your own health and promote honest conversations with your team.
• Increase awareness of the importance of wellbeing.
• Ensure the work environment is safe, and encourage staff to look out for each other.
• Involve staff in decisions – creating an environment with a better work-life balance means involving staff in decisions that affect when, where, and how the work is performed.
• Monitor workloads – overworked staff tend to make more mistakes and can become disgruntled if this continues on for an extended period of time.
• Invest in wellbeing programmes, e.g. stress management, recovery, and self-care.
• Provide organisational support, e.g. employee Aasistance programmes (EAP) that give employees access to trained specialists.
• Offer exercise and mindfulness programmes to support health, e.g. step challenges, or lunchtime yoga.

Benefits of a resilient workforce
There are many benefits to building employee resilience. It also means you meet your legal obligation to manage risks to employees’ mental and physical health, just like any other health & safety risk. Some of the key benefits are:

• Increase in productivity.
• Increase in employee engagement and job satisfaction.
• Decrease in work-related injuries and illnesses.
• Decrease in burnout, absenteeism, and presenteeism (being at work but preoccupied or distracted).

Start small and implement changes as you can. If you don’t know where to start, start by asking your employees – they’ll often know what changes will make the biggest difference.