How do you measure resilience in your non-profit team?

1 What is resilience assessment?

Resilience assessment is the process of evaluating how well your team can respond to and recover from disruptions, crises, and opportunities. It involves identifying the factors that affect your team's resilience, such as your culture, values, goals, resources, relationships, and skills. It also involves measuring the outcomes of your team's resilience, such as your performance, well-being, satisfaction, and impact. Resilience assessment can help you understand your team's strengths and weaknesses, and guide you to develop and implement action plans to enhance your team's resilience.

2 Why is resilience assessment important?

Resilience assessment is a valuable tool that can help you and your team to recognize and appreciate accomplishments, address challenges and gaps, and enhance confidence and motivation. It can also assist in aligning your team's vision and values, strengthening communication and collaboration, increasing flexibility and creativity, and improving productivity and quality. Ultimately, resilience assessment helps to foster a positive culture, build trust and respect, embrace change and innovation, and deliver on your mission and goals.

3 How do you conduct a resilience assessment?

Conducting a resilience assessment involves various methods and tools, depending on the context, needs, and preferences of your team. Surveys and questionnaires, such as the Team Resilience Assessment Scale (TRAS), can be used to measure resilience levels, dimensions, and indicators. Qualitative methods like Appreciative Inquiry (AI) can be used to gather feedback from team members and stakeholders. Experiential methods such as scenario-based exercises, like the Harvard National Preparedness Leadership Initiative (NPLI) Meta-Leadership Simulation, can be used to observe and test your team's resilience in action.

4 How do you use the results of a resilience assessment?

The results of a resilience assessment can help you to benchmark your team's resilience against other teams or standards, identify your team's resilience priorities and goals, design and implement resilience interventions and strategies, monitor and evaluate the effectiveness and impact of these interventions, and communicate and share your resilience results with your team and stakeholders. Additionally, it will enable you to track your progress over time, align your goals with your strategic plan, adjust interventions as needed, and solicit input and feedback.

5 How do you sustain your team's resilience?

Resilience assessment is an ongoing process that requires commitment and support. To maintain your team's resilience, you should create a culture that values and promotes resilience by modeling resilient behaviors, acknowledging and rewarding resilience efforts, and providing a safe and supportive environment. Additionally, you should build a resilience network by connecting with other resilient teams and organizations to seek and offer advice, collaboration, and recognition. Finally, review your resilience results and actions regularly by reflecting on achievements, celebrating milestones and learnings, and updating goals and strategies.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?