By Melissa Goodman
We all want a workforce in Aotearoa that is thriving, booming, engaged and resilient, right?
Words and phrases such as mindfulness, stress reduction, fostering positive engagement and resilience building have become commonplace in most workplaces. As general concepts these are largely impactful, positive, appealing and can increase worker satisfaction.
With this in mind, it would make sense that organisations would want to engage in suitable interventions to help build such capabilities. These interventions come in four main categories:
Primary interventions: aimed at reducing sources of stress, such as redesigning jobs to better fit the work/worker.
Secondary interventions: focus on modifying responses to stressors that primary interventions cannot reduce or remove, such as offering resilience training.
Tertiary interventions: treating symptoms, such as offering counselling to workers who are negatively affected by the content of their work.
Rehabilitation: when ill-health has gone beyond the three previous intervention categories, therefore needing active rehabilitation - such as when injury has occurred and return to work programs are required.
According to Giga, Cooper and Faragher (2003) most organisational interventions tend to be aimed at the secondary level: helping employees to manage their stress and training them in better coping strategies. This is not all bad, don’t get me wrong, but it can be problematic when organisations are placing the onus of all workplace issues on the individual instead of looking at the wider causes of commonplace stressors. By focusing on the individual’s capacity to be “resilient” workplaces are missing golden opportunities to look introspectively at workplace practices and culture. Furthermore, focusing on the individual’s level of resilience may produce the opposite effect by increasing negative outcomes through compounding and invalidating the concerns of workers.
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