Resilience - Evidence-based Stress Management Training.

Whilst the HSE’s management standards cover ways of limiting organisational stressors, we believe that heavy workloads, greater cognitive load and interruptions all make stress inevitable. So rather than focusing solely on the stressors, we focus on changing responses to stress.

Our Resilience course builds participants' psychological flexibility, which has been shown to work in a number of stressful work environments including media organisations, financial services, call centres and in dealing with people who are already anxious and depressed.

Psychological flexibility has been shown to increase:
1. Job performance (Donaldson & Bunce, 2004).
2. Attention and focus (Davidson et al., 2003).
3. Improved mental health (Flaxman & Bond, in press).
4. Learning and innovation (Bond & Flaxman, 2006).
5. Sickness absence (Bond & Hayes, 2002, Flaxman, 2006).
Background
Research shows that workplace stress is associated with job burnout, mental and physical ill-health, absenteeism, low job satisfaction and reduced organisational commitment and performance. 

Knowing that some stressors are inevitable we challenge embedded negative perceptions and responses to stressful situations and provide alternative coping strategies to improve health and well-being as well as work performance and productivity.

Our training courses and individual coaching programmes address personal perceptions of potential stressors such as excessive workload, deadlines, important presentations or meetings, office politics, or conflict with colleagues. Use of the psychometric instrument StressScan is an option to provide an individual scorecard of important health risks and resources.

We teach a proactive coping model and provide plenty of opportunity for interaction and practice.

Participants are encouraged to identify future goals and anticipate potential hurdles, we then work on developing techniques and strategies to address them.  Participants will produce a personalised resource tool kit during the course relevant to their personality and situation.

We take a broad view of well-being and also consider lifestyle, support networks and relaxation techniques.

A sustainable approach to stress management is encouraged with appropriate support material provided to facilitate this.

These proactive skills increase self-efficacy and are associated with reduced stress and general work success.  As an added benefit they also transfer from the work place to daily living!

These courses can be run as part of a broader commitment to creating a healthy organisation.  Our organisation level interventions on stress management includes researching the issues with the workforce, implementing appropriate stress-busting measures and establishing a Workplace Stress and Fatigue Policy.