Building the Business Case for Employee Resilience Training

Employers are exploring employee psychological resilience training to reduce their risk of lost time, presenteeism, and depression.

Resilience solutions are gaining ground in leading corporations such as Dow Chemical and American Express. The Journal of Occupational & Environmental Medicine (JOEM) recently reported resilient employees have higher psychological capital, health status, and job satisfaction, combined with lower perceived stress, burnout, and presenteeism (disengagement at work).¹ The report describes resilience as a set of competencies to learn and develop: emotion regulation, impulse control, causal analysis, self-efficacy, and realistic optimism.

Resilience is frequently associated with mindfulness, another skill that can be cultivated and trained. But resilience owns a special position as the ability to bounce back from stress or adversity — which are nearly continuous events in our fast-paced global economy. Employee engagement is a key to workplace productivity for many organizations, yet resilience is the path to engagement under difficult circumstances.

Resilience has a longer formal history in the United Kingdom and Canada, where it is embedded in employment laws for the protection of employees. To better understand the contrasting models for resilience and how to achieve it in the workplace, we will review both the U.K model as well as the U.S. model.

United Kingdom Model

In the United Kingdom, employment laws address resilience in the context of providing safe and healthful workplaces. The UK provides a voluntary tool to help employers meet its mandates, the Management Standards (MS) of the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE), listing six key areas of work design:

• Demands (including the person’s workload, work patterns, and the working environment)
• Control (the person’s freedom to organize and approach work as desired)
• Support (encouragement and resources provided by the organization, line management, and co-workers)
• Relationships at work (promotion of positive working practices to avoid or minimize conflict)
• Role (do people understand their role in the organization and does the organization prevent conflicting roles for individuals)
• Change (how organizational change is managed and communicated)

An organization’s status across the six areas of the MS is measured by an “Indicator Tool,” a 35-item survey.² It has been validated by multiple studies as an effective tool to predict negative stress-related work outcomes such as job-related anxiety, depression, near misses, and sickness absence.³

Using the Indicator Tool, employers are scored based on the average of scores from individual employees. Employer scores fall into four categories: urgent action needed (scores below the 20^th percentile); clear need for improvement (20^th to 50^th percentile); good (50^th to 80^th percentile); and doing very well (above the 80^th percentile). Before employers take corrective actions, they are encouraged to further validate the findings and areas to improve by holding focus groups or other communications with workers.

To build the business case for resilience, two Italian researchers investigated the relationship between MS scores and employee personal development, job performance, and “organizational citizenship behavior.” The researchers secured completed MS surveys from 326 employees or 64% of a local business unit of a utility offering diverse services including energy.

They found that a high-demand work environment that also gives employees a high level of control over their work was associated with higher self-reported job performance and personal development.² “Challenge stressors” such as workload and time stressors were positively associated with job performance and personal development. “Hindrance stressors” such as organizational politics, role ambiguity, and job insecurity had a negative association.

The researchers concluded, “interventions based on ill-health outcomes alone could help organizations to successfully reduce work-related stress, but could not fully guarantee the promotion of positive outcomes, the focus on which could provide useful information for the development of interventions with a… preventive orientation.”

United States Model

While the United States has workers’ compensation programs and penalizes workplace bullying and discrimination, employers face no mandate to support employee resilience. As in other areas such as paid family leave, this country relies on voluntary employer initiatives to support employee resilience rather than federal legislation.

Those initiatives are diverse and may overlap or run parallel to programs such as mindfulness, engagement, and well-being. Stress management is a mitigation strategy, while resilience is a learning process that supports personal growth. Some stress management vendors may include resilience aspects in their program, and several vendors offer resilience or mindfulness programs, including Claritas Mindsciences, Emindful, Lantern, meQuilibrium, and Whil.

One of these vendors, meQuilibrium, is using a unique approach featuring “digital coaching” which provides individualized plans that build resilience skills using a suite of automated training tools. Automated training is gaining traction in the marketplace as employers seek to reduce costs and desire scalable solutions to quickly ramp up from pilots to full implementation.

The 16-question meQuilibrium survey yields a “meQ score” on a 100-point scale to help guide individuals in resilience training. This score can be used to identify individuals at higher risk for negative work or personal outcomes, similar to the way health risk assessment scores are used. Employee scores can be aggregated to assess the level of strain in workplaces, helping employers identify opportunities to reduce stress.

A recent report in a peer-reviewed journal described the meQuilibrium survey and resilience training outcomes. Working with a sample of 2,063 completed surveys, meQuilibrium tested its survey against several validated surveys.⁴ This research, published in JOEM¹ found that people with higher resilience as measured by the meQ score had less negative impact from eight areas of workplace strain such as “stress score” and “high intent to quit.”

The study concluded that a high-strain work environment had the strongest negative impact on burnout, job satisfaction, and sleep problems. In low-strain work environments, resilience provided a higher level of protection in four areas (Figure 1 below; charts A, B, D, F). In high-strain workplaces, resilience provided a greater increase in job satisfaction (E) and higher protection against likelihood of absence (G), compared to low-strain workplaces. Resilience also showed strong protective effects in high-strain workplaces against likelihood of depression (C) and productivity loss (H).

Figure 1: Outcomes Comparing High and Low Resilience Under High- and Low-Strain Work Environments

These findings bolster the business case for investing in employee resilience:

• In both high-strain and low-strain work environments, resilience provided a protective effect.
• In high-strain work environments, resilience provided a strong protective effect against lost time, low productivity, and depression, which are top cost targets in many organizations.

MeQuilibrium also conducted a validation study that was not peer-reviewed. One interesting finding was that, on average, a 1% improvement in the meQ score was associated with a reduction of 0.24 absence days per year, or nearly one absence day per four people per year.⁵ Responsiveness to meQuilibrium training varies from one employee population to another. In one case study, a financial services firm averaged a relatively high 8% improvement in meQ score among all employees participating, resulting in substantial improvement across multiple risk areas. MeQuilibrium is also researching its claim that resilience interventions for corporate leadership may influence overall organizational effectiveness.

Conclusion

meQuilibrium’s program offers employers a business case to work from as they look to introduce prevention strategies. However, employers will still need to answer several questions before they introduce a resilience program in their organization. Is the program engaging enough that their employees will stay with it? Does it deliver resilience that can measurably improve performance of their employees in their industry? Can resilience training replace stress management, partially or totally? Can it be integrated with other offerings in their employee assistance program or wellness program? An open-ended, employee-focused approach may appeal to Millennials especially, who may regard it as a benefit rather than another work obligation.

References

1. 1. Shatté A, A Perlman, B Smith, WD Lynch. The Positive Effect of Resilience on Stress and Business Outcomes in Difficult Work Environments. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine 2017 Feb; 59(2): 135–140. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5287440/
   2. The MS Indicator Tool can be retrieved at http://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards/pdfs/indicatortool.pdf
   3. Toderi S, C Balducci. (2015). HSE Management Standards Indicator Tool and Positive Work-Related Outcomes. International Journal of Workplace Health Management. Vol. 8 Issue 2, pp.92-108, doi: 10.1108/IJWHM-11-2013-0044. Retrieved from http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/IJWHM-11-2013-0044
   4. The meQuilibrium 16-question resilience scale was evaluated against the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire, the Patient Health Questionnaire–9, the Perceived Stress Scale, and the Positive Psychological Capital Scale.
   5. WD Lynch. January 2016. Why Resilience Matters. Retrieved from https://www.mequilibrium.com/2016/01/20/why-resilience-matters/