Over the past few years, resilience has become one of the most talked about topics in the workplace.
Organisations have invested in wellbeing programmes, resilience workshops, mindfulness apps, mental health training and employee assistance programmes. Conversations about stress and burnout have become more open, and that’s undoubtedly a positive step. People are far more likely to seek support than they were a decade ago, and many employers have made genuine progress in recognising the importance of employee wellbeing.
None of that is a bad thing.
In fact, resilience is an incredibly valuable capability. It helps us navigate uncertainty, adapt to change, recover from setbacks and maintain perspective when work becomes challenging. Supporting people’s wellbeing should remain an important priority for every organisation.
However, I sometimes wonder whether we’ve started asking resilience to solve problems it was never designed to solve.
When employees are overwhelmed, our instinct is often to ask how we can help them become more resilient. We look for training, tools or techniques that will help people cope better with pressure.
But what if the more important question is this:
Why has work become so difficult that people need to be resilient quite so often?
That’s a very different conversation.
Throughout our work with organisations, we rarely find that people are struggling because they lack resilience. More often, they’re navigating an accumulation of everyday challenges that make work harder than it needs to be. Constantly changing priorities, overly complicated processes, unnecessary meetings, unclear decision making, growing workloads, disconnected systems and competing expectations all create friction that slowly drains people’s energy.
None of these things are particularly dramatic on their own. Yet together they can create an environment where simply getting through the working day requires a huge amount of mental effort.
In those circumstances, resilience becomes essential.
But it also becomes reactive.
Rather than helping people respond to occasional challenging periods, we’re asking them to compensate for problems that have become part of everyday work.
This is where I think organisations have an opportunity to shift their thinking.
Instead of immediately asking how we can make people more resilient, perhaps we should also ask what we’re expecting them to be resilient against.
Are our processes helping people do their jobs, or getting in their way?
Have layers of complexity quietly built up over time?
Are managers expected to carry responsibilities that have steadily expanded without anything being taken away?
Have we normalised ways of working that make unnecessary effort feel inevitable?
These are design questions rather than wellbeing questions, but they’re just as important if we want people to thrive at work.
One of the principles we return to time and again at People Lab is that employee experience is shaped far more by everyday work than by individual initiatives. The way work is designed influences how people feel every day. If work is confusing, fragmented or unnecessarily difficult, no amount of resilience training will remove those underlying causes.
That’s not an argument against investing in wellbeing.
Quite the opposite.
When work is well designed, resilience becomes what it was always meant to be: a capability that helps people navigate the unexpected, embrace change and recover from life’s inevitable challenges. It complements good work rather than compensating for poor work.
Perhaps that’s the balance we should be aiming for.
Create working environments that remove unnecessary friction wherever possible, while also giving people the skills and confidence to deal with the challenges that will always remain. Organisations need both.
If you’ve been reflecting on your own wellbeing or resilience while reading this, we’ve created a free eight-week wellbeing toolkit that explores resilience alongside emotional intelligence, achievement, relationships, engagement, positive emotions and meaning at work. Each week introduces practical ideas and simple actions that can help you strengthen your own wellbeing over time.
You can sign up to receive the series here.
At People Lab, we believe the best workplaces don’t choose between improving wellbeing and improving the design of work. They recognise that both matter. By removing unnecessary barriers while helping people build the capabilities they need to navigate change, organisations create environments where people are far more likely to succeed and thrive. If you’d like to find out more about what we do and how we might be able to help you, get in touch – we’d love to hear from you!
