New Study From Potential Project Reveals That Resiliency Is the Key to Boosting Employee Retention

The study found that employees with high resiliency have 21% higher job satisfaction and 31% lower turnover

The stress of the COVID-19 pandemic from working from home to caregiving challenges has triggered widespread feelings of burnout among employees, leading to retention and productivity challenges for companies. According to The Mind at Work study by Potential Project, resiliency is key to changing the workplace experience and helping employees remain happy and engaged with their jobs.

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The Mind at Work is revolutionary in its approach to assessing the employee experience. Data is captured via Mindgrow, Potential Project’s proprietary digital diagnostic tool, which gathers respondents’ feedback real-time within the flow of a workday. Mindgrow was developed with academic research partners from Harvard Business School, Columbia Business School, Rotman School of Management, and University of California Berkeley Haas.

The research found:

• Employees are faced with stress triggers — something that causes physical, emotional, or psychological strain — more than 36% of the time spent at work.
• Among employees who have a high level of resilience — measured by the time it takes for a person to return to a baseline after experiencing stress — burnout is 27% lower and turnover is 31% lower.
• Among employees who have a high level of resilience, job satisfaction increases by 21% and job engagement increases by 26%.
• The employees most at risk for burnout are those who report high levels of job engagement but low levels of resilience. These employees experience stress levels almost 4 times the stress levels of their more resilient colleagues.

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As remote and hybrid work remain the reality, leaders are hungry for new ways to keep their new teams engaged. This research points to employee resiliency as a critical priority. “Companies need to arm their employees with the tools needed to manage inevitable workplace stressors. Resilience is a muscle, and by helping our employees strengthen it, we can build happier, more stress-resistant teams,” said Rasmus Hougaard, CEO of Potential Project.

Rasmus is the co-author of an upcoming book titled Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way, co-authored with Potential Project’s North American Director Jacqueline Carter, which shows leaders how to practice wise compassion to boost their companies’ productivity and morale. The book, published by the Harvard Business Review, is now available for pre-order ahead of its launch on January 18th, 2022.

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