Working to build resilience leads to greater well-being and engagement within Ashfield Engage

Please note, this article contains references to Ashfield Engage which has now become Inizio Engage

“The Great Resignation.” “Job Burnout.”  “Work/Home Balance.” These are commonplace terms in today’s employment landscape. How to best address these phenomena is top of mind to most human resource organizations throughout the world.

Our Learning and Development (L&D) team at Ashfield Engage Patient Solutions has been well ahead of the curve in this regard. Recognizing that employees who believe their organization cares for their well-being are 69% less likely to actively search for a new job and 71% less likely to experience a lot of burnout,¹ our Patient Solutions L&D team has developed robust trainings and workshops to not only complement our onboarding trainings but to provide support throughout the employee journey, resulting in better job satisfaction and overall low attrition rates.

Even before the additional stressors created by the COVID pandemic, our Patient Solutions L&D team had put special training programs in place to help our clinical educators and managers with their work and well-being. These programs were originally developed to help team members within Patient Solutions address how to best engage with the patient, care partner, HCP customers, managers and fellow team members, as well as develop the necessary energy management resources to tackle what they face on a daily basis. Pivoting to address issues created by the pandemic and beyond for all Ashfield Engage employees was already possible with the toolbox developed.

“This dedication to employee well-being is one of the hallmarks of the culture at Ashfield Engage, and has led to our ability to retain and advance employees in their journey here. As a result, we are able to provide our clients with highly engaged teams, possessing the necessary resiliency resources to fully engage no matter what their role.”
– Greg Flynn, Global CEO, Inizio Engage.

Achieving well-being with resiliency

Because the workshops and experiences centered around building resilience are key to addressing the emotional and psychological issues arising from living and working today, they have become a key offering to all employee teams within Ashfield Engage. They are geared to help the participants achieve and maintain well-being. That’s a tall order for many, but providing them with the tools and resources they need to take better care of themselves is a top priority within the Building Resilience program.

“Anyone working today has a lot to do, and does not necessarily possess all the resources that we need to be successful and happy in our career. The goal with our Building Resilience program is to help our employees try to better understand not only the necessity of time management, but more importantly, how to address their energy management so that they achieve the balance they need.”
– Natalie Ivanovs, Trainer, Patient Solutions, Ashfield Engage.

The Building Resilience program’s experiences and workshops rely on a toolbox containing evidence-based approaches and strategies to assist our employees with developing the skills needed to achieve a better work/home life balance and self-awareness. Provided as in-person or virtual workshops, they draw upon the tools and strategies known to help people best address their energy management.

Topics covered include managing emotional and physiological responses to stress, breathing techniques, grounding and centering techniques, Mindfulness, gratitude, self-care and self-compassion. A typical session on self-care might incorporate conversations around the basics of the need for sleep, proper nourishment, connection and play and also address how all of these contribute to the team member’s sense of well-being.

The program recognizes our employees must be able to first step back and take care of themselves in order to recognize what others might need from them. Team members learn the important skills of understanding how to calm their energy down when needed, or what needs to be done to bring their energy up to meet the engagement at hand, and most importantly, feel comfortable doing so.

To support this, the program takes a holistic approach to enhancing well-being. It offers both longer term practices to build a foundation of resilience, and techniques that don’t take a lot of time to do to help re-set or re-center in the moment. For example, the guidance may be to incorporate daily movement and eat balanced meals over time, and to offer simple breathing or mindfulness exercises that can be done quickly to help the employee “show up” more fully and tackle the next situation with more focused energy.

“Natalie’s training was our favorite team training at Ashfield Engage.  Not only did we learn tools to deal with some of the feelings we have when work is busy, deadlines are tight and life is going on at the same time – but we learned a lot more about each other as teammates and how we manage stress.  We had a chance to discuss, share and learn tools used to build resilience and left the training on a high note!”
– Carey Galvin, Global Head, Quality & Compliance, Ashfield Engage.

The rewards of connectivity

Instructors are pleased to see how employees connect to talking about ways they can be more mindful, or how they can best express gratitude or recognize the benefits of self-compassion. The Building Resiliency exercises and workshops are quick to resonate with participants and they soon come to realize the connective tissues between all of us. Not only does this realization improve well-being, it also ultimately lays the groundwork for better engagement with colleagues, HCPs, patients and care partners, pharmacists, payers and others within the healthcare marketplace.

“Being able to recognize that there is a common humanity, that we are not the only one having these feelings of self-doubt or anxiety is such a strong benefit of our Building Resiliency program. Our goal is to help team members recognize what they can do to navigate the situation in a way that helps them feel better.”
– Lise Seger, Global Senior Director, Patient Solutions Learning and Development, Ashfield Engage

¹ Jim Harter, Gallup. “Percent Who Feel Employer Cares About Their Wellbeing Plummets.” March 18, 2022. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/390776/percent-feel-employer-care…wsletter-Email-MembershipBenefits-Buzz4422-23792&lid=sc50mqlx1q1m