What is Career Resliency?
How Do You Identify Stress at Work and Issues Such as Bullying?
The definition of resiliency is:
The ability to recover quickly from illness, change, or misfortune; buoyancy. The property of a material that enables it to resume its original shape or position after being bent, stretched, or compressed; elasticity.
Resilience can be thought of as our ability to bounce back, or even grow, in the face of pressures and threats. The Workplace Resiliency Index™ is meant to measure how a person is coping with the pressures that affect workplace performance. The ability to bounce back from change or to be able to ‘resume your original shape’ in spite of a setback is what resiliency is all about.
The Tetrahedron of Workplace Resilience
I have found the tetrahedron to be the minimum structural system in the universe. Buckminster Fuller
The tetrahedron is formed of 4 triangles. The four triangles together form a pyramid structure. The idea is that a solid career and workplace performance is built on a solid structure. The four triangles which form workplace resiliency are:
- Workplace
- Personal Life
- Health
- Adaptability
Each triangle has three sides. The sides include measurements :
Workplace
- Workplace Support (including supervisor, peers and organization)
- Job satisfaction (including recognition, punishment, alignment of values, compensation, career direction)
- Empowerment (including ability to influence workload, job demands and ability to set and achieve realistic goals)
Personal Life
- Work-life Balance
- Personal relationships (including relationship conflicts and external stressors
- Support (including friends, family, children, etc.)
Health
- Physical health (including both physical and mental illnesses)
- Safety (including both physical and emotional bullying as well as physical conditions, etc.)
- Mental Health/Self-esteem (including depression, phobias, etc.)
Adaptability
- Coping (including debts, ability to adapt, creative problem solving and how to create options)
- Change management (including job/organizational/career change)
- Time Management
Why the Tetrahedron?
In a tetrahedron, there are no opposites, each piece affects the other. It is the same with resiliency in the workplace. Stress in one area affects the performance of the other areas. The idea of a 3 dimensional structure such as the tetrahedron is to understand how each element interacts with the other in order to build career resilience.
Three colors represent each face of the tetrahedron
- Green = Go/Optimal – either no or positive effect on performance
- Yellow = Warning/Marginal Performance – stress is building up and affecting performance
- Red = Stop/Burnout – stress is functioning
Together, when all four triangles are green, the tetrahedron forms a solid structure on which to build a solid career.