In Times of Stress, Build Your Team’s Resilience Rituals

Part 4 of the 5-point checklist: Buoyancy

A Diving Checklist approach, written by Luciana Barrancos in collaboration with Skylyte.

4) Team-building; in diving terminology: Buoyancy

Similar to diving, where you keep your buoyancy mainly through balance and breathing, we also need to keep our lightness and resilience of spirit together with our teams.

What does it mean?

People should continue to feel they are part of a team, to have a sense of belonging and appreciation for this — now remote — workplace. Researchers have found through correlational, longitudinal and experimental studies that having a sense of belonging predicted higher meaningfulness in life. Belonging is very important for our physical and mental health, as it helps with managing stress, coping with difficult times, and improving motivation.

Sample Rituals

There are great ways of doing it and we encourage you to think beyond the traditional “virtual happy hour”. For instance, you could consider delivering coffee or tea to people’s houses and sharing a brew together; scheduling a kids & pets time on your videoconference; baking something together; doing a Trivia night; doing fun exercises to get to know each other (the “36 questions that lead to love” is an ‘alternative’ resource to guide the discussion); Karaoke…

Rotate this responsibility within your team and have team-building events every week. We suggest that you find a healthy mix between reflection-driven (finding purpose, getting to know each other better) versus fun activities (because we all need some levity!). From a behavioral science perspective, humor and levity help us to relieve anxiety, create more meaningful connections at work, and enhance creativity. One of the links between humor and its psychological benefits is related to laughter. Even the anticipation of it has been proved to decrease our stress hormone (cortisol) and our “fight or flight” hormone (epinephrine) by 39% and 70%, respectively.

Reminder prompt: “I get by with a little help from my friends”