During the pandemic, organizational leaders learned the importance of resilience. Helping staff be more resilient gives them tools and skills to recover from difficult situations and crises and see the light in dark times.
Defined by the U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services as “the ability to withstand, adapt to, and recover from adversity and stress,” resilience helps teams to effectively respond to and recover from crises and problem-solve with agility and creativity.
Characteristics of resilience include optimism, altruism, a moral compass, humor, having a role model and social supports, and a willingness to face fear. It is helpful to assess your workers’ resilience and give them the skills and tools to be flexible and confident. There are several tools available to help measure individuals’ resilience. You can use these to help identify where there are gaps and what support and guidance your employees need.
- Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC). This tool assesses resilience as a function of five interrelated components: personal competence, acceptance of change and secure relationships, trust/tolerance/strengthening the effects of stress, and control, and spiritual influences.
- Resilience Scale for Adults. This assesses key factors that contribute to highly resilient individuals: family support and cohesion, external support systems, and dispositional attitudes and behaviors. More specifically, the tool looks at personal competence, social competence, social support, family coherence, and personal structure.
- Brief Resilience Scale. This is a self-rating questionnaire that is designed to measure a persons’ ability to bounce back from stress. It can provide some key insights, particularly for individuals with health-related stress.
- Resilience Scale. This is the oldest of the resilience scales, and it is intended to measure resilience based on meaningful life (or purpose), perseverance, self-reliance, equanimity, and existential aloneness. These characteristics are assessed using two subscales: the 17-item Personal Competence Subscale and the 8-item Acceptance of Self and Life Subscale.
- Scale of Protective Factors (SPF). Developed in 2015, this scale is designed to capture a comprehensive measure of resilience with 24 items measuring two social-interpersonal factors and two individual factors.
- Predictive 6-Factor Resilience Scale. This measures resilience as a function of six domains concerning several concepts: vision (self-efficacy and goal setting), composure (emotional regulation), tenacity (perseverance and hardiness), reasoning (higher cognitive traits like problem-solving), collaboration (psychosocial interaction), and physiological health.
Whatever tool you use, it is essential to employ it consistently across the board. Make it clear to employees that there won’t be any repercussions of low scores. Explain that it is designed to help them be more resilient and agile and navigate the stresses and challenges of everyday life as well as crises and emergencies.
