Battling Adversity in the Workplace
Experiencing or handling adversity at work can be both exhausting and demoralising, whether it’s dealing with difficult colleagues, overcoming organisational changes, facing personal challenges that spill into your professional life, or struggling with issues like discrimination or even a lack of opportunities. Which is why implementing strategies for resilience and success in order to battle adversity is so important, both from a personal level and from an overall business perspective.
From an employee perspective, how you respond to these challenges can shape your career, personal growth and overall well-being. From a business perspective, how you battle adversity within your organisation is crucial for building and maintaining a positive workplace culture, fostering engagement and productivity.
Understanding adversity in the workplace
Workplace adversity can manifest in lots of ways, from conflicts between colleagues to individuals being made to feel undervalued or overlooked for opportunities. Some common adversities at work include:
Interpersonal conflict
Organisational changes
Workload pressure
Discrimination and bias
Personal challenges or issues
Strategies to battle adversity
For an employee
Understanding the nature of the adversity that you face as an employee is the first step in addressing it. We’ve put together a list of ways to help overcome adversity in the workplace on a personal level.
1. Cultivate emotional intelligence: Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage your emotions and those of others. Being emotionally intelligent can help you navigate the complexities of workplace relationships and challenges, and allows you to respond appropriately, without adversity dictating your actions. Practice actively listening to others, being empathetic and self-regulation so that you can improve your interactions with colleagues and reduce the impact of conflict or stress.
2. Develop resilience: Being resilient means being capable of recovering quickly from any difficulties you face. Try to cultivate a positive mindset and learn from your setbacks. Remember, resilience is not about avoiding adversity but about facing it head-on with confidence and the ability to bounce back.
3. Seek constructive feedback: Feedback is essential for growth, but it can be difficult to hear, especially if it’s negative. But try to see any feedback as an opportunity to improve. Proactively seeking constructive feedback can help you identify areas for development and demonstrate your commitment to growth. Show adaptability by taking that feedback on board and learning from it.
4. Foster strong relationships: Building strong, supportive relationships with colleagues can help reduce the chances of workplace adversity. Building a network of trusted coworkers can lead to better understanding, reduced conflict and increased collaboration.
5. Set boundaries: To battle adversity effectively, it’s important to set boundaries, advocate for yourself, and prioritise your well-being. This might involve saying no to additional tasks when you’re already overwhelmed, taking regular breaks to recharge, ensuring that you maintain a healthy work-life balance, or documenting incidents and standing up for yourself in times of unfair treatment.
6. Focus on problem-solving: When faced with adversity, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the problem. However, by approaching adversity as a problem that can be solved, rather than an overwhelming challenge, you can take proactive steps to overcome it.
7. Embrace change: Change can often be a big trigger of workplace adversity, whether your company is rolling out a new policy, there’s a change in management or a shift in your job responsibilities. It can be unsettling, but it can also present opportunities for growth and development. Embrace change!
As an employer
Maintaining a healthy, enjoyable workplace culture is vital when trying to prevent adversity in your organisation. Here are some strategies for navigating these challenges:
1. Foster open communication: Encouraging a workplace of transparency, where employees feel comfortable in expressing their concerns is key to reducing any sense of adversity. Promote the use of regular check-ins where challenges can be expressed and support can be provided.
2. Build and develop a strong leadership team: Ensure leaders are leading by example, and help your leadership team by providing them with training for things like conflict resolution, emotional intelligence and change management so they can deal with adversity effectively.
3. Promote a positive workplace culture: Encourage collaboration and support amongst your employees to create a positive and cooperative environment. Ensure you recognise good work, and reward where necessary to avoid creating adversity.
4. Implement conflict resolution policies: Make sure you establish clear protocols for resolving workplace disputes efficiently to prevent them getting out of hand. The key here is to nip the problem in the bud as soon as you can by identifying the problem and addressing it in a quick and efficient manner. We recommend always trying to include HR as a neutral mediator in more serious conflicts.
5. Be adaptable: As an organisation, you want to be flexible and adaptable in order to deal with any changes or challenges that are thrown your way. By creating a framework that is adaptable, and being open to changing your policies or strategies to those that might better cope with challenges, means you’ll likely reduce the chances of being negatively impacted.
6. Provide support and strengthen employee resilience: There are two points in one here! First, think about offering access to resources and support that will help employees dealing with adversity or stress, whether that be counselling and mental health support or development opportunities to empower employees to overcome challenges. Second, offer your employees training to help manage stress, time and other coping strategies to prevent adversity’s in the first place. Promoting a balanced work and personal life will also help to prevent unnecessary stresses.
7. Invest in coaching: Coaching is a proven way of helping to identify and overcome challenges both at a personal employee level, and at more wide-scale business levels. At EZRA, we provide coaching for leadership, wellbeing, change and transformation and much more.