What is: Staff Wellbeing and Resilience

Helping your staff to thrive

As a leader, it’s important you support the wellbeing of your staff and manage your own wellbeing. The work at Metro North Health can be tough, and make employees vulnerable to fatigue, stress and burnout. It’s up to you to check in and make sure your staff are OK, and to offer them appropriate support when they need it.

What’s wellbeing and resilience?

There’s no universal definition of wellbeing, but the concept refers to how people feel and function in four key domains—emotional/psychological, social, physical and financial. It’s not something you either have or don’t have. It’s more like a continuum, ranging from distressed to thriving. Only an individual, team or facility can define where they sit on the continuum. Your job is to offer support that meets them where they’re at.

Resilience refers to a person’s ability to recover quickly or bounce back from challenging situations. Resilience can fluctuate. Sometimes we cope better than at other times, depending on what’s going on in our lives. But there are things we can do to build resilience and our ability to cope with the inevitable challenges of life and work. How we do this varies from person to person. It’s important to find strategies that work best for you and your situation.

Why is this important and what’s my role?

As a leader, you need to ‘keep a finger on the team’s pulse’ and identify who needs support. You also need to manage your own wellbeing and build your own resilience, so you have the energy and enthusiasm to lead others.

What do I need to do?

Assess wellbeing

Start with yourself. Rate where you are on the continuum below, for each of the domains. Identify one area you’d like to improve in, and what it would take to shift your rating one point to the right.
Identify staff in need of support. Follow the process above for someone in your team who could do with support. Again, refer to the suggested options below.

Offer support

There’s a range of strategies that can help staff in each domain. Your aim is to support them to move from a state of distress, where they’re experiencing:

compassion fatigue
burnout
vicarious traumatisation
maladaptive secondary traumatic stress responses

to a state of flourishing, where they’re:

positive
engaged
feeling cared for
enjoying work.

Strategies for psychological/emotional wellbeing

You can offer distressed staff:

support in managing difficult emotions such as depression, anxiety and anger
trauma support – peer support, trauma debriefing
compassion/self-compassion strategies
employee assistance service (counselling)

When staff are surviving, they might need:

resilience training
conflict management strategies
values work (living according to values)
signature strengths work (strength to enhance our lives)

To help thriving staff continue to thrive, point them to:

Seligman’s PERMA model of positive wellbeing
wheel of wellbeing model

Strategies for social wellbeing

Distressed staff may need to access domestic violence services or bullying and harassment services
Surviving staff can be supported with strategies/interventions for enhancing social connections
Thriving staff may like strategies for building positive relationships

Strategies for physical wellbeing

Staff suffering physical distress may need a GP consultation
To move from surviving to thriving, remind staff to get regular exercise, a nourishing diet and enough sleep
To stay thriving, staff need regular exercise, a healthy diet and adequate sleep.

Strategies for financial wellbeing

Distressed staff may need legal advice or financial/superannuation advice
Surviving staff may benefit from a financial/superannuation consultation
To keep thriving, staff may like a financial/superannuation consultation

Build your resilience

You build resilience by looking after yourself, or with ‘self-care’. There are things you can do in challenging times to help you through. And there are some good everyday habits that will build your resilience and ability to cope with future stress and challenges. Remember that everyone’s different. Pick some strategies that appeal to you.

In challenging times you can try:

going for a quick walk
writing down what happened and how you’re feeling about it (but don’t send it in an email!)
talk/debrief with someone
focus on what you’re grateful for (even though it’s hard sometimes)
take three deep breaths
look at a photo of someone you love
listen to music
put things in perspective by thinking about whether your concern will still matter in a year.

Develop positive everyday habits like:

exercising
eating healthy food
drinking water
getting enough sleep
having ‘no-technology’ time each day
spending time outside and in nature
connecting and laughing with others
joining a group (as a hobby, to volunteer, or out of interest).

You might like to try some apps, such as:

“Calm” or “Smiling Minds”—guided meditations, music and stories, designed to reduce stress and anxiety and promote sleep.
“365 Gratitude”—helps you cultivate a grateful mind using a daily gratitude journal and engaging stories.
“Buddhify”—mindfulness exercises designed to promote calm, clarity and kindness.
“Stop, Breathe and Think”—helps you stop and check what you’re thinking and feeling, to practice mindful breathing and create space between your thoughts, emotions and reactions.
“Think Ladder”—helps you evaluate and challenge unhelpful beliefs that create stress and anxiety and replace them with empowering insights.

Support your team’s resilience

Monitor your team’s wellbeing and resilience by checking in regularly. Encourage them to check in with each other and to reach out for help.
Talk about the importance of wellbeing and self-care, for example, take time at each team meeting to discuss.
Ask your team how they’d like to support each other e.g by having buddies who check in with them regularly, or by sharing self-care strategies.