Case study: Meridian Energy Ltd
EVIDENCE
An opportunity to explore resilience inside one of New Zealand’s major renewable energy companies, where keeping the country powered brings its own pressures and demands.
Background
We partnered with Meridian Energy to explore whether resilience training could change not only how people responded to pressure, but how they experienced life at work.
We looked at two important resilience behaviours, Rumination and Detached Coping, alongside employees’ perceptions of management style, empowerment, workload and communication.
The study
One Meridian Energy team took part in the Challenge of Change resilience programme, beginning with a comprehensive assessment of resilience and the wider working environment. The same measures were repeated after the programme.
A second team acted as the control group. They completed the same assessments over the same period, but without receiving the training. This gave us an important comparison and helped us understand whether the changes seen in the first team could be associated with the Challenge of Change programme.
The results
The results showed significant change.
Following the Challenge of Change programme, the trained team became less likely to ruminate and better able to keep pressure in perspective. The optimal range is 0-2 for Rumination and 8-10 for Detachment coping, which the experimental group achieved. They also reported significant improvements in management style, empowerment and communication shown on the second chart.
The control team showed no significant change.
The interesting finding was that developing individual resilience appeared to coincide with a wider shift in how people experienced the organisation around them.
