The Eight Pillars of Organizational and Employees Wellbeing: Part 4 of 4 Blog Mini-Series

Previously we covered Introduction to Eight Pillars of Organizational and Employees Wellbeing and Pillar 1, Pillars 2 and 3, Pillars 4, 5 and 6

Let's move to Pillars 7 and 8. 

Pillar 7: Gratitude

Organizational Gratitude
In addition to looking forward to new goals, organizations need to look back at past successes and be grateful for what they have achieved in every business area, such as sales, marketing, development, employees satisfaction, human resources, technology, etc. At the same time, they should constantly look for improvements.

Gratitude is vital for a successful and authentic organization. When business is grateful for past successes, they build on gratitude and optimism. And that, in turn, will help them achieve even bigger goals.

Employees Gratitude
Gratitude is another topic everybody talks about these days.
But gratitude at work needs to be created based on organizational successes. Properly trained leaders can help employees increase their personal and work gratitude levels.

Employees should focus on the good things that happen at work - friendships they created, opportunities that opened up, projects they are working on, results they have achieved, etc. When employees are grateful for the good things at work, they will be happier and more successful.

Align Organizational and Employees Gratitude
The organizations and employees can be grateful for the same thing, and there could be genuinely one-to-one relationships between them. Both could be grateful for the same results, contributions to success, healthy financial statements, new products, services, etc.

For example, when the organization does well financially and is grateful for it, it could positively affect employees and improve their financial picture. When a business is focused on life balance, employees will be thankful for that. When corporations focus on lowering employee turnover, employees will not have to spend productive hours training a new hire, etc.
 

Pillar 8: Organizational and Employees Resilience and Purpose
Organizational Resilience
The organizational purpose is much more than the purpose statement. We know that business purposes must be clearly defined. Unfortunately, sometimes organizations will issue the purpose statement, never revisit it, and think they have done their job. Suppose you are in a position to create this for your organization. In that case, I encourage you to dig deep and make a purpose statement that truly represents your business and is measurable and attainable.

Like in our personal life, the organization does not become resilient overnight. Businesses need to continuously work on resilience, regularly test it and update their plans accordingly. It is a never-ending life long process. Keep in mind that each business unit's infrastructure, sales, marketing, development, etc.) needs to have its resiliency plan.

Let’s use a trading company as an example and focus mainly on the Information Technology (IT) Department. IT maintains data centers; data centers have many servers where trading happens. If trading goes down for any time, the company might go out of business.

But what if the machine where trading is happing goes down? We plan for it and build redundancy. In this case, another device would pick up that trade. If the entire data center goes down, another data center will continue doing trading and so on. Depending on the company size, the organization builds the best resilience it can afford. So the trading, in this case, never stops and the business continues running without hick-ups. But of course, resiliency is not just technical; it is much more than that.

The top 10 Organizational resiliency factors are optimism, fear of failure, social responsibility, believing in something bigger than an organization, social support, organizational role model, office fitness, organizational intelligence, working smart, and purpose. As you can see, many organizational resiliency factors are the same or similar to employee resiliency factors.

Employees Resilience

This article focuses on resiliency at work and how employees may apply them.
To learn more about resilience, check Top Ten Scientifically Proven Resiliency Factors. These factors are optimism, facing fear, moral compass, spirituality, social support, role model, physical fitness, brain fitness, cognitive and emotional ability, and meaning and purpose.
 

Align Organizational and Employee Resilience
There is one thing I know for sure; resilient employees create resilient organizations.

Things happen in our life - good, bad, and ugly. The same thing is true for the business.
When employees understand resilience, they can help organizations establish redundancy to prepare for small disasters. Organizational changes are inevitable. And the key to success is how companies and employees adapt to the change.

Earlier, we said there are ten organizational and ten employee resiliency factors. Let’s see how we align them.

Optimism 

When employees and the company they work for are optimistic about the organizational future, that is a starting point for success. Of course, this optimism has to be grounded, as discussed earlier.

Facing Fear 

 The equivalent organizational resiliency factor is Fear of Failure. There's often a fear that the business may not make it, especially in the very beginning. Entrepreneurs know this. But it does not mean they are going to give up. They will not.
If an employee knows how to face fear personally, and an organization knows how to handle that fear of failure, we have a beautiful alignment.

Moral compass

This employee resilience factor is equivalent to Social and Moral Responsibility for the organization. Ideally, an employee's moral compass is aligned with business moral and social responsibility. If so, it is one more factor for improved productivity at work.

Spirituality

Spirituality is defined as believing in something bigger than ourselves. An organization should believe in something more significant than the business itself from that perspective. Profit must be made. But when a company starts from the point of serving clients, the revenue will come. When they only focus on the business and profit, they create unhappy employees and unhappy clients. Not a way to create a resilient organization.

Social Support

Without social support, an organization can not survive. Without social aid, people can not function. Today that is expanded to social media, a key factor especially for small businesses looking to grow globally.

Role Model

Most of us have role models. So do many organizations; another successful business is a role model. Hopefully, these two role models have similar characteristics so that employee feels as if they have one role model to help them succeed at work.

Physical Fitness

I aligned personal fitness with Office Fitness. By office fitness, I mean how the office is organized, how comfortable it is, how employees can do some physical fitness while at work - a gym, a yoga studio, outdoor activities, etc. Or maybe the company does not have any of these facilities, simply cubicles, and yet, somehow, it just the environment feels so comfortable.

Brain Fitness

To improve our intelligence level, we need to keep learning and keep practicing and increasing the fitness of our brains. This characteristic is aligned with Organizational Intelligence. By aligning these two, businesses and employees are in the right place.

Cognitive and Emotional Strength

This characteristic is aligned with Working Smart. Although many organizations will ask employees to work hard, which is okay, working smart is even better. Working smart will produce great results for the company and employees when structured correctly.

Meaning and Purpose

Hopefully, the organization has established its purpose and meaning; aligning with employee purpose would be ideal.
Employe should look for meaning in their work, but start small - find meaning in almost every task they do. There is a meaning to go to work, be assigned to that project, help clients, get to know your colleagues, help the company improve, etc. Everything becomes more manageable once people find meaning in what they do.

These are examples of simple ways of aligning organizational and employee resiliency factors. Each organization and its leaders will need to dig a little deeper, understand each of these, and work with employees to align them to improve organizational and employee well-being. But the key is to identify resilience factors for the company and each employee and align them.

Braco Pobric is an Internationally Recognized Positive Psychology Expert, Executive Coach, and Corporate Trainer. He is the bestselling author of Habits and Happiness: How to Become Happier and Improve Your Wellbeing by Changing Your Habits. Braco is a founding member and Chief Happiness Officer of the Life Success Academy, Certified Positive Psychology Master Coach and Trainer, and former globally Certified Trainer and Business Coach for Dale Carnegie Training. His unique approach to integrated learning in Positive Psychology Coaching (PPMC) program let him train over 60,000 Students in 172 countries.