Increasing individual resilience
within the work place the practicalities
Dr Olivia Carlton
Head of TfL Occupational Health
Railway Health and Wellbeing Conference
20 October 2014
What is resilience?
Speedy recovery from problems
Ability to recover quickly from setbacks
Ability to react to potential crisis
To identify, assess and respond to potential disruptive
situations and prevent it becoming a crisis.
Elasticity of matter
Ability to spring back into shape after being bent or stretched
Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary
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How to increase resilience in the
workplace
• Individual
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Learn about it
Develop self-awareness
Desire to change to become more resilient
Learn and practise small changes
• Line manager
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As for individual
Understands themselves and their impact on their people
Wants to behave in a way that allows their people to flourish
Has time to reflect!
Actively manages good and poor performance
• Environment
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People respected and treated with dignity
Policies that are fair
Processes for people management that are timely
Resilient culture – allows recovery after effort
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Practicalities
• Need a common language
– People must be talking about resilience
• Works best (some would say it only truly works) if there is
high level buy-in and leadership, not only in words but in
behaviours
• Need some methods to encourage behaviour change
• Need to be able to measure where you are as a company
• Need a systems approach
• Various ways to achieve these
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The TfL approach slide 1
• Co-ordinated by mental health lead for the company
• Individuals
– E-learning for individuals – uses self assessment
– Seminars and workshops are available
• Managers
– Incorporate into people management training (still working
on this one – making progress)
– Workshops for managers
– “Hot spot” work
– Use a part of regular management meetings to reflect (best
practice – this happens with some groups of managers)
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The TfL approach slide 2
• Health Fairs
• Policies and procedures
– Aim to be fair and timely
• Culture – increasing focus on behaviours
• Measures – though employee surveys
– Trialling a “pulse” survey
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What affects resilience – the individual
©EJT Associates
SUPPORTIVE
THINKING
INNER
BUOYANCY
APPLICATION
RESILIENCE
COMMUNITY AND
NETWORKS
POSITIVE LIVING
SELF CONTROL
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Power of self assessment
• A simple self-assessment questionnaire (© EJT
Associates)
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Four questions for each domain of the model
Score each question 0 – 10
Gives an overall score
Looking for a balance across the domains
Most people score much more highly in some than others
Focus on the low scoring areas
Very simple to understand
Revisit it as often as the person wants to
• Encourages self-reflection
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What helps managers
• Common language
• Time for reflection
– Self as resilient
– Provides a model for the team
– Small changes to culture;
o Shared lunch once a month
o Walk once a week
• Involvement of their peers
– Eg 10 minutes at a regular managers meeting to reflect together
on progress
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Conclusion
To increase individual resilience we need an
organisational, systems approach
Good luck!
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Questions?
olivia.carlton@tube.tfl.gov.uk
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