How to boost resilience
And other tactics to create a top performing workspace
After The Netherlands won against The United States during the 2022 World Cup, Dutch footballer Denzel Dumfries first and foremost thanked his psychologist Annemieke Zijerveld for helping him overcome mental struggles, boosting his resilience and finding inner peace, which in his opinion significantly improved his performance and made him man of the match in the game against the U.S.
Although he isn’t the first athlete to publicly talk about tactics for coping with stress to up his game, the topic isn’t commonplace yet in sport and other areas of life, where top performance is cultivated.
It makes you wonder why training the mind to build resilience isn’t part of the package of every professional high performer. It also raises the question of who is responsible for providing mental gym facilities anyways: the individual or the organisation surrounding the team and the individual.
Recently, a lot of media coverage focuses on people who indicate to suffer from stress and ultimately experience burnout. Often the conclusion is drawn that we should fix this problem by eliminating stress from the workplace altogether. However, stress is a reality in any high performing, high achieving team. It drives employees’ motivation and brings about outstanding results. The key to stress is maintaining a healthy level. Therefore, we believe that eliminating stress is neither feasible, nor desirable and the challenge can be approached more effectively.
We dug into research on stress in the workspace and found best practices that proved that companies can make stress work for them, instead of suffering from it. Teams that mindfully balanced stressful periods with the right amount of rest outperformed teams on productivity and well-being, that focussed on eliminating stress altogether.
Winning teams perceived stress as an elevated level of energy they could use to boost their performance. At the same time, they treated their energy like a scarce currency, mindful not to spend it all in one place.
A few interesting tactics distinguished those teams from others:
- Teams made reflecting on mental health an everyday routine, simply but meticulously measuring what worked for them and what didn’t.
- Teams upgraded their workplace regularly, testing micro improvements, pointed towards the areas of worklife causing their energy levels to drop.
Sounds familiar? Congratulations, you are performing at a very decent level! Interested to learn more about opting your standards? Please feel free to reach out to me, so we can share insights and I give you a preview into the tool we are about to introduce to organisations to infuse well-being into their workplace. Cultivating a healthy workplace up to World Cup level, is way closer than you might think.
Resources to do some digging yourself:
Best Practices for of High Performing Remote Teams
Study by Microsoft Human Factors Lab.
Harvard Business Review: Burnout is preventable and why micro improvements help.
If you really want to go nuts in researching the relation of stress and team performance, check this one.
