Personal Resilience Elearning
21st January 2014
In this Marshall ACM elearning insights post we look at personal resilience elearning course and how it can benefit organisations.
When the going gets tough, how do your employees react? Are they cool under pressure? Can they bounce back strongly from any setback or do they break? Are they a well-oiled machine that can withstand stress and pressure and never buckle, no matter what they face? If not then personal resilience training could transform your company.
Squeezed by the recession, many companies have been forced to put more work on less staff, with the inevitable result of rising stress levels. Major companies around the world have begun to implement personal resilience training on a regular basis to ensure their employees stay fighting fit. It’s a trend that is filtering down and one that’s enabled by elearning courses.
The real cost of stress
Giving your staff resilience training isn’t just a kind thing to do, it can make a serious difference to your bottom line. Stress related illnesses costs UK businesses 28 billion a year through time off alone.
Of course it doesn’t have to get to the stage where employees are calling in sick for stress to affect their performance. Any time they feel overwhelmed, they can potentially cost you money by making poor decisions, which can lead to workplace injuries and mistakes, or simply failing to work at their full potential.
By implementing resilience training through a Learning Management System, workers can learn to cope better when they become stressed both in and out of work. Elearning is a powerful and cost-effective way to facilitate resilience training, meaning that companies can invest in ongoing training in order to ensure that staff are fully prepared and learn resilience and how to cope in a touch environment.
The power of positive thought
A positive attitude, made possible with e-learning resilience training, will help staff maintain peak performance, make the right choices at critical times and keep a cool head under pressure. This helps to give the whole team confidence and makes success a self-fulfilling prophecy. Any company that implements this is investing in its staff and the company itself. A business that cares about employees and takes action to help them will succeed in the long term.
Personal resilience e-learning courses through an LMS can help to:
- Reduce personal anxiety
- Give staff the ability to cope more effectively and flexibly with change
- Improve problem-solving and creative skills
- Improve decisiveness and assertiveness
- Enhance self-esteem and the ability to bounce back
- Improve morale
For the enterprise, this means that staff will be more inclined to be more productive as they feel that they are valued, as the company is willing to put the time and money into resilience training.
Personal resilience training combines physical and mental exercises that conspire to focus the mind when you’re under duress. Even the military use these techniques, so its soldiers maintain a cool head in the heat of battle. If the techniques are trusted to save lives, they can definitely help to save a company’s revenue.
It’s not them, it’s you
External events in themselves cannot create turmoil in your mind or, largely, in your business. It is the reaction to those events that is the critical factor. Resilience training offers practical, real world learning in problem solving and the tools necessary to cope with stressful situations.
A large part of any e-learning course that involves resilience training involves reframing negative situations as challenges to overcome. This in turn helps your team to focus on the positive aspects of any situation, no matter how much pressure they are under, and keep marching forward.
Bite-sized chunks
An essential part of problem solving is breaking every process down and creating a series of realistic goals. Resilience and positive thought are not just about taking punishment, they help you think creatively and set up a task the right way so that you don’t hit trouble in the first place.
Accepting the issues you can’t change
Accepting the things you can’t change is also critical in removing the unhelpful victim mentality that many workers suffer from. Understanding that some problems simply cannot be avoided, and dealing with them as they arise, rather than becoming distracted and angered by simple, everyday problems is a major part of personal resilience training. Once you accept the things you can’??t change, you can focus on the things you can.
When using a LMS to implement the training, this can be undertaken individually or for a team, helping to avoid fractures in team work. Whilst of course this could be done in a classroom, this is expensive and inconvenient, whereas resilience training implemented through the LMS can be carried out at times when it’??s best for both the company and employee.
Take care of yourself
The elearning course platform should also address physical aspects to becoming more resilient in the workplace. Eating well, avoiding alcohol, sleep all of these things can be touched upon during the elearning experience.
It can also make workers aware of any tension that’s building up and teach them how to recognise other signs of stress before they turn into a problem. In the heat of battle, it’s easy to ignore the warning signs of stress build-up that can cause unhelpful explosions in the workplace leading to even more issues.
Fixing the corporate culture
One much-overlooked part of personal resilience training is the corporate culture at each individual company and how it affects the employees. An individual needs to feel nurtured and valued, if they are to perform at their best in the workplace. The company must also have a strong management structure in place, which does not allow petty squabbles to overflow and can cope with small problems before they become big ones.
Part of any solid personal resilience elearning course is to implement a stress buffer and make sure that the staff has the right level of support, from each other and the management team.
Light relief
Even the office environment can impact on stress levels and there has been a great deal of research into fluorescent lighting’s negative impact on a person’s psyche. Conversely, lots of natural light and plants can help lower stress and make for a more relaxing working environment that lowers stress levels across the board.
Personal resilience training could soon become mandatory. In Australia the workplace is already held liable for a worker’s psychological welfare and with the number of stress-related cases hitting the courts in England, it’s not hard to see it happening here. With economic stress also affecting all of us to some extent or another, stress and depression is rising rapidly in the UK.
For individuals and companies, stress is a killer. So it pays to invest in personal resilience elearning to keep your employees on top of their game and ready to get going when the going gets tough.
The good news is, this can all be done through an LMS, which will ensure that it’s affordable for the company in terms of time and money and makes for a great investment into the people that work for them.
