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Key points
- According to research, employee engagement is down to 21 percent, with employee stress at an all-time high.
- Building resilience helps employees thrive amid the uncertainty, isolation, and change in today’s workplace.
- Organizations that celebrate risk proactively build a sense of psychological safety for employees.
The constant disruption in today’s working world is undermining our well-being. Increasingly, our workplaces are challenging places to survive, never mind thrive. According to Gallup’s 2022 State of the Workplace report, employee engagement is at a low of 21 percent, with many employees finding little or no satisfaction in their work. Employee stress is also at an all-time high. Further, people are increasingly grappling with finding a sense of meaning in their working life.
Tomorrowmind: Thriving at Work, Resilience, Creativity, and Connection — Now and in an Uncertain Future, a new book by mental health experts in the field of workplace mental health—Martin Seligman, Ph.D., a pioneer of positive psychology and director of the Positive Psychology Center, and Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, MD, founding CEO of LifeLink—offers hope and valuable insights or anyone interested in exploring what it takes to succeed in today’s rapidly changing workplace.
I spoke with Kellerman about how building resilience, connection, and creativity can help us thrive amid the uncertainty, isolation, and constant change in today’s workplace.
Dr. V: First, let’s talk about resilience, and how we, as individuals, can work on becoming more resilient.
GRC: Our data set revealed five skills that predict resilient outcomes for individuals, teams, and organizations. They are cognitive agility, the ability to alternate between opportunistic scoping of the environment and focused effect; emotional regulation, the ability to identify our emotions, reappraise them, and then make centered non-reactive decisions; optimism, the tendency to feel hopeful or positive about the future; self-efficacy, the self-confidence in our ability to accomplish our goals, and; self-compassion, the ability to extend to ourselves the playbook of compassion we would extend to others in the same difficult scenario.
Dr. V: Let’s look at social connections—why they matter, and why they are so elusive in today’s workplaces.
GRC: Social connection matters personally, professionally, and organizationally. Personally, every model of well-being includes social connection as a pillar. When we are connected, we are healthier. Loneliness is bad for both physical and mental health.
Professionally, the social connection allows us to collaborate more effectively with colleagues and customers. It yields a deeper sense of belonging. And organizations need innovation, which comes from employee collaboration.
Dr. V: Finally, let’s talk about the importance of creativity in today’s workplaces. What do you mean when you say that now we are all creatives?
GRC: In previous labor eras, particularly industrialization, creativity was not a core workplace skill. Because technology increasingly automates the less creative parts of our jobs, what is left to do is more innovative and less rote.
Dr. V: Your research identified a link between resilience and creativity.
GRC: We found an incredibly strong correlation between highly resilient individuals and highly creative individuals, and the same for organizations. Creative success relies on iteration. The “overnight success” is usually many months or years in the making, with significant obstacles along the way. We need to be able to push through failure and learn from setbacks to reach innovative success.
Dr. V: What can organizations do for employees to support creativity?
GRC: Organizations can celebrate risks. This is how we proactively build a sense of psychological safety. When employees feel worried about being punished for an unsuccessful risk, they hold back the ideas we may need most. Organizations can also treat everyone as creative. Leading organizations treat innovation as a firm-wide capability, at every level, rather than a specialized skill.
Dr. V: How can we develop our creativity, as individuals?
GRC: We can build habits and lifestyles that facilitate creativity. Seek novelty. This involves looking for ways to break up routines and seek new exposures. Dial in incubation periods, mind-wandering in between sessions of focused work. And embrace ambiguity. The early phases of creative projects, before we’ve determined a direction, can provoke anxiety. We want to rush through discovery to arrive at a decision. But these discovery periods are where we generate the winning idea, and we rush them at our own peril.
Dr. V: What’s the most important takeaway from Tomorrowmind?
GRC: I hope that individuals who are struggling will learn concrete tools for building resilience; and that those who have more psychological resources will invest in building the skills that can help them thrive at work today. The message in Tomorrowmind is one of science-based hope. We are not doomed!
