The lead-up to Christmas is one of those points in the year when work and life edge close to tipping point.
Like panic buying, work can often go into overdrive, with end of year reports and reviews in process while children are appearing in all manner of Christmas shows and parties, necessitating last minute costumes and cakes. No wonder many parents spend more Christmases than they care to remember with a cold or worse.
It’s a good time, then, to reflect on the kind of stamina that can see an employee through years of such predictable work-life challenges, and a few unpredictable ones.
Resilience is a bit of a buzzword in HR at the moment, with all sorts of advice being put forward. In her new book, How to be really Productive, coach Grace Marshall says one of the keys to tackling an endless work to do list is knowing yourself (when you are most focused and productive, for instance, or what your priorities are) as well as organising your time better and delegating. One suggestion to tackle a never-ending workload is giving yourself daily “finish lines”.
She says: “When there’s a finish line in sight, you’ve got something to aim for. It gives you direction, definition and a reason to muster up the strength and to sprint ahead.”
Geetu Bharwaney is an expert on emotional Intelligence and emotional resilience. She says our emotions play a crucial role in what we do at work and how we do it.
For her, personal resilience begins with a sense of self worth and knowing who you are and what your skills are. That means looking after yourself and having a good support team around you, including friends and family at home and positive mentors at work so you can ask for help when you need it.
She is also a big advocate of organisational skills. That includes planning tomorrow today; listing all tasks – both work and home; prioritising; understanding your high energy times of day and doing the most important tasks then; working in longer cycles so you can plan for the long term as well as the short term; asking if a meeting is really necessary before you set one up; saying no more often; ensuring you have some quiet times during the day and delegating both authority and responsibility.
She says: “Emotional resilience distinguishes the people who perform and cope with stress effectively from those who just get by, one project or one day at a time. As Charles Darwin discovered: ‘It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change’. Emotional resilience provides the foundation for human adaptability.”
Adaptability to change is a concept many parents will be familiar with. In fact, they may feel they have a PhD in it after going through all the ages and stages of young people’s lives. The problem arises during those times in life where everything is changing at the same time: your childcare breaks down and you’ve been asked to take on vital new project, for instance, or your elderly parent has a fall just as your workplace goes into restructure.
The good news is that many successful women have been through similar challenges and more and more of them are talking about their own experiences.
Jane Bristow, a managing director at Sodexo, the international food services and facilities management organisation, says she has faced some tough decisions in her working life and has had to make compromises. “I always thought of myself as a mum first, businesswoman second,” she says. “At times I have had to be confident in order to do the right thing for my children.”
What has helped has been the support of her husband, good childcare, a wide network of family and friends and supportive employers.
Not everyone has that support network or a good employer, although a growing number of organisations are linking employee wellbeing with increased productivity. Dr Yvonne Thompson interviewed 22 women who had made it to board level for her book Seven Traits of Highly Successful Women on Boards. She says that, for her, two of the most valuable pieces of advice she took from the women she spoke to was not to take things personally and that “this too will pass”.
Interestingly, work-life balance was not the biggest single drain on the resilience of employees revealed in the first major study linking personal resilience, gender and career success. The survey, carried out by Sarah Bond of For Business Sake in partnership with Dr Gillian Shapiro of Shapiro Consulting, found the main problem they faced was managing difficult relationships and workplace politics.
Most said they had learned resilience on the job, through overcoming difficult challenges and from making mistakes. The most successful strategy was to amass people around them who matter, both inside and outside work, people they could rant to or laugh with; who made them feel valued.
Very few had any support in developing this resilience from their employer and Bond and Shapiro say employers need to take a much more proactive approach to helping employees build the relationships they need for career resilience.
A lot of the advice in the report could, of course, equally be applied at home: asking for help, accepting your limitations, knowing yourself and building a support network. It’s something to remember in the rush towards the end of the year.
