• The Wellbeing Project

Case Study

The 5 Pillars of Resilience

Gore

Background:

This client is a uniquely creative, technology-driven global company focused on discovery and product innovation and is an industry leader in terms of employee engagement and performance. Significant investment is made in ensuring employees are equipped for their roles both from a technical and behavioural perspective.  Team work is highly valued and all employees are considered stakeholders in the success of the organisation.  This brings with it a ‘duty of care’ for all in the face of change.

Brief:

The organisation is undergoing a period of significant change at one geographical location to meet the strategic needs of the business.  The Wellbeing Project was asked to design and deliver a Resilience Programme to enable employees to navigate and succeed through this significant change.

The client required the proposed solution to:

  • Be appropriate for all employees in the organisation regardless of their role or individual situation
  • Acknowledge that the individual impact of change is different for all and allow each participant to reflect on this personally
  • Identify the importance of personal resilience to a healthy, balanced life – not just at this time of significant change
  • Allow for personal reflection and the development of action plans specifically to meet personal objectives

 

Solution:

  • Design and development of 1 day ‘5 Pillars of Resilience’ workshop with particular focus on content to:
    • Enable individuals to understand change and recognise their own response to change. This included attention to the brain’s role in change and understanding how this influences behaviour
    • Equip participants with practical, easy to apply tools to help them build personal resilience and ultimately navigate change effectively
    • Appreciate differing perspectives of all involved in organisational change and understand how best to support colleagues
  • Development of a Personal Resilience Questionnaire to recognise individual strengths and development areas. This was completed by participants prior to the workshop to raise awareness and understand current reality.
  • Development of ‘Team Resilience’ profile to provide a clear picture of the combined resilience profile for attendees and stakeholders of the programme
  • The facilitator stayed connected with stakeholders of the programme throughout to ensure:
    • Understanding of the change process over time in the organisation and make adjustments to delivery accordingly
    • Consistent feedback of key themes from workshops and any recommendations
    • Content applicable to needs of participants, adjusting as necessary
  • Ample opportunity to develop personal action plans with shared commitment to delivery
  • Resilience Toolkits designed by The Wellbeing Project available with further information and practical tools to embed learning from workshop
  • Signposting existing resources and support in the organisation to complement the programme

Models were used within the training and toolkits that would provide a talking point and language for the whole organisation.

Keeping The Programme Alive

The Wellbeing Project continues to collaborate with stakeholders to understand how to further support and enable colleagues in the period following reorganisation.  Ideas include:

  • How to enable individuals and teams to apply their learning from My Resilience; to maximise team work and create a desired organisation for the future, for example through the Personal Best series of workshops
  • Taking the programme to other parts of the business with a focus on Resilience to amplify their productivity and results

Participant Feedback:

Many participants attended the workshop based on colleague recommendation and consistently provided excellent feedback.  Examples include:

  • All very good material in helping me to view a situation from a different perspective and what I can do to influence both how I feel and how I make others feel
  • Excellent course; enjoyable and informative and importantly very much helped to raise my positivity about my future
  • My objective for the day was to have a change of mindset and it’s succeeded and put me in a more positive outlook or I have the tools to change that outlook
  • Very professional facilitator, easy to be open with. As facilitator had been through a similar experience she could empathise easily with where we were.

Gore

Stakeholder Feedback: 

“We recently engaged with the Wellbeing Project to take a large number of our Associates through resilience training.  From the start, it was obvious we had found a partner of high quality who was both easy to work with and truly cared about the effectiveness of their training and helping us as a company.  Many Associates have taken the training and found it either extremely helpful in working through challenging times, or equipping themselves with strategies to be able to cope in challenging times of change.  The trainers were knowledgeable and inspiring as well as practical and caring.  We appreciated the Wellbeing Project’s willingness to adapt their materials and respond to what’s going on in our organisation.  We would not hesitate to work with them further or recommend them to other companies.”

Vikki England
 Associate
WL Gore & Associates