Times of change are inevitable, and businesses aren’t immune from events that unfold outside their control. But how an organization responds to those challenges can make or break its prospects for future success.
Is your company ready for change?
From climate catastrophes to the next global health crisis, the world will continue to conjure up external challenges that may test the limits of your organization, its leadership, and the individuals that make up the org chart. Fortunately, there are things leaders can do to help make their organizations more resilient from the inside out.
According to a recent study published in the journal Organizational Psychology Review, creating an autonomous yet supportive work environment encourages employees to stay motivated and develop their skills, even when facing choppy waters—economic or otherwise.
So, how do business leaders strike the ideal balance between autonomy and social support during uncertain times? The answer may start with looking at workers’ lives–specifically, the stressors they experience–more holistically, suggests Evangelia Demerouti, a co-author of the research paper and an academic with professorships at Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands.
Demerouti points to the 2006 Job Demands–Resources theory that hypothesizes that stress increases as demand increases without enough resources.
How to help employees to deal with demands and to develop themselves:
- Create autonomy
- Offer social support
To come to her conclusion that autonomy and social support are key drivers of employee achievement and resilience, Demerouti analyzed more than 100 scholarly articles. She also recorded her observations during the global pandemic.
The research offers some key suggestions for organization leaders: They should, perhaps more than they did in the past, consider how the organization influences and is influenced by the worker, their job, and their family.
How autonomy leads to workforce resilience
Honoring the many layers of an employee’s life begins by allowing them to work how, when, and where they’d like. Demerouti’s research shows the infrastructure to allow for this autonomy can help workers meet their demands and develop their skills along the way.
Demerouti says an organization should clarify roles and provide continuous and transparent communication from senior leaders to junior team members to create an autonomous work culture.
“Different demands and resources are more relevant based on the kind of crisis and the employee, but by clarifying roles, executives, middle management, and frontline employees are all empowered to participate in their own sensemaking,” she says.
According to Demerouti, no matter the size or goals of a company, the general infrastructure of any one workforce consists of executives, middle management, and frontline or entry-level workers. Executives are responsible for clearly setting and stating company goals, middle management determines how those goals will be achieved, and it is up to frontline workers to achieve such goals.
Middle management can also continue to mediate between top managers and frontline workers. At the same time as they’re encouraging frontline workers to determine their own risk management, they’re also available to make sure such decisions align with top players.
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