Stop Telling Your Employees to Develop Resilience
Resilience has become an inescapable corporate buzzword, with employees being told they need to ‘develop resilience’ as a universal remedy for workplace challenges. It’s presented as the solution for everything from mounting stress and persistent burnout to fundamentally toxic work environments.
– Struggling with an overwhelming workload? Develop resilience.
– Dealing with a toxic manager? Learn to be more resilient.
– Exhausted from unrealistic expectations? Perhaps a mindfulness workshop will help you cope better.
But the uncomfortable truth is that employees shouldn’t need extraordinary levels of resilience just to survive their jobs. The fact that “resilience training” has become a booming industry tells us something about modern workplaces, that they’re often designed in ways that systematically drain people of their natural resilience reserves.
Instead of constantly telling people to develop resilience, organisations should focus on designing work environments that don’t push employees to their breaking point in the first place. It’s time to shift the responsibility from solely on individuals to a shared commitment between employees and organisations, beginning with the creation of workplaces that are fundamentally human, sustainable, and psychologically safe.
This paper is the first of a two-part series on individual and organisational resilience. This first part focuses on the organisational perspective, with the second addressing the individual’s role in developing personal resilience.
The Problem with the "Just Develop Resilience" Narrative
The Individualisation of Systemic Issues
When someone experiences burnout or chronic stress, the message they typically receive is: “You need to get better at handling stress” instead of “Let’s examine why this role is causing so much distress.” This subtle but crucial shift in framing places responsibility on the individual rather than examining the system that created the conditions for burnout.
This kind of framing can be particularly harmful because it compounds the suffering of already struggling employees. Not only are they dealing with excessive workplace demands, but they’re now additionally burdened with the implication that their struggle represents a personal failure rather than a reasonable response to unreasonable conditions.
The framing of resilience in workplace contexts places the burden squarely on individuals rather than addressing underlying systemic issues. This approach creates a dangerous dynamic where structural problems become framed as personal deficiencies.
When organisations focus exclusively on building employee resilience without examining why that resilience is being depleted in the first place, they engage in a form of wilful blindness that ultimately serves no one, neither the employees nor the organisation’s long-term health.
The overemphasis on personal resilience can lead employees to remain in harmful environments longer than they should. They come to believe that their struggles reflect personal inadequacy rather than recognising that the system itself is fundamentally broken.
This creates a cycle of learned helplessness where employees blame themselves for their inability to thrive in toxic environments. They internalise the message that they simply need to be “tougher” or “more adaptable,” beating themselves up for struggling to cope while failing to recognise the significant role played by organisational factors.
What We Should Be Asking Instead:
Instead of asking how to make employees more resilient, organisations should be asking deeper, more systemic questions:
- Why do so many of our employees consistently feel overwhelmed and exhausted?
- Are we designing jobs and workflows that genuinely support well-being and growth, or are we inadvertently setting people up to fail?
- What specific role does our organisation play in creating or alleviating workplace stress?
- How might our leadership approaches, communication practices, and cultural norms be contributing to employee strain?
- What structural changes would make resilience less necessary in our everyday operations?
- How are our targets and reward systems (individual and organisational) driving a culture that is unsustainable for employees?
These questions shift the focus from “fixing” employees to examining and improving the systems within which they work, a far more productive approach for sustainable organisational health.
This need is becoming more urgent as older workers who are used to the current ways of working are replaced by younger colleagues with different expectations. We frequently hear from clients that younger generations are refusing to buy into the idea of working all hours, and are imposing much stronger boundaries than previous generations. This means that organisations will be forced to review their expectations of employees.
If your business model has been built around the expectation that individuals will routinely work long hours, but you can no longer rely on them to do that, you may need to factor in a larger workforce or investment in technology to achieve the same output. Your business model may be built on an outdated understanding of employee compliance. For instance, in the public sector, we are seeing organisations such as the UK National Health Service experiencing a ‘brain drain’ of highly trained staff who are attracted to work for health services in other countries such as Australia because they offer better pay and a much better work-life balance. This is creating supply issues in a sector that is already stretched to breaking point.
What Organisations Should Focus on Instead
Create Resilient and Sustainable Jobs
Many modern-day roles are unintentionally designed for burnout. They involve excessive workloads, unrealistic expectations, and little to no space for recovery or reflection. This approach is not only harmful to employees but ultimately self-defeating for organisations, as it leads to increased turnover, reduced productivity, and no time or headspace for creativity and innovation.
Fix Unmanageable Workloads
Instead of pushing employees to “cope better” with impossible demands, organisations should rigorously assess whether job expectations are genuinely realistic given available resources and human limitations.
This means conducting honest audits of role expectations, eliminating unnecessary tasks, providing adequate resources, and ensuring that workloads can be reasonably accomplished within standard working hours. It may require difficult conversations about priorities and capacity, but these discussions are essential for creating sustainable work environments.
Respect Boundaries
Organisations must move beyond paying lip service to work-life balance and actively implement practices that protect employees’ personal time and energy. This includes discouraging excessive overtime, respecting non-work hours by limiting after-hours communications, and creating clear expectations about availability.
Leaders should model these boundaries themselves, demonstrating through their actions that sustainable work practices are truly valued. When a manager sends emails at 11 pm, regardless of what they say about work-life balance, they’re communicating that after-hours work is expected.
Build in Recovery Time
Human beings are not designed for constant output. Our cognitive and emotional resources require regular replenishment through adequate rest, reflection, and recovery periods. Organisations should deliberately build recovery time into work schedules and processes rather than expecting employees to operate continuously at maximum capacity.
This might include implementing meeting-free days, providing adequate transition time between intense projects, encouraging regular breaks throughout the workday, and ensuring that holidays are truly respected as recovery time rather than merely delayed work periods.
Your Alternative: Instead of telling people to develop resilience, conduct thorough workload audits to identify areas of unsustainable pressure. Use this data to redesign roles, redistribute work more equitably, and eliminate unnecessary tasks that consume employee energy without adding commensurate value.
Develop Better Leaders, Not Just More Resilient Employees
Many workplace stressors emanate directly from poor leadership practices and ineffective management. Instead of making employees more resilient to bad leadership, organisations should focus on developing leaders who create environments where extreme resilience isn’t constantly required.
Train Leaders in Emotional Intelligence
Leadership development should prioritise emotional intelligence as a core competency. This means teaching managers to recognise signs of stress and burnout in their teams, communicate with empathy and clarity, and provide appropriate support during challenging periods.
Leaders with high emotional intelligence create psychologically safer environments where problems can be discussed openly before they escalate, reducing the need for high levels of resilience from team members.
Hold Leaders Accountable for Employee Well-being
Organisations should expand their definitions of leadership success beyond purely financial or operational metrics to include indicators of team well-being and psychological safety. This might include measuring employee engagement, turnover rates, stress-related absence, and direct feedback about management practices.
When leaders understand that their own performance evaluations and career progression depend partly on how well they support their teams’ well-being, they’re more likely to prioritise creating healthy work environments.
Your Alternative: We aren’t saying that you shouldn’t offer resilience workshops for employees struggling under poor management, but you should also invest in comprehensive leadership development programmes and performance management systems that prioritise human-centred management approaches. Ensure these programmes include practical skills for creating psychologically safe environments, managing workloads effectively, and supporting team well-being.
Create a Culture of Psychological Safety
Employees naturally thrive in environments where they feel safe, valued, and respected, not in settings where they must constantly protect themselves from stress, criticism, or burnout. Building a culture of psychological safety represents one of the most powerful ways organisations can reduce the need for extraordinary individual resilience.
Encourage Open Conversations About Well-being
Organisations should actively normalise discussions about stress, burnout, and workload concerns. When employees can speak honestly about these issues without fear of judgment or career repercussions, problems can be addressed before they become crises.
This requires leaders to demonstrate vulnerability themselves, acknowledge the challenges of their own roles, and respond supportively when team members express concerns. It also means taking these discussions seriously and implementing genuine changes in response to feedback, rather than merely creating the appearance of listening.
Address Toxic Behaviours Head-On
No amount of personal resilience can adequately protect employees from bullying, discrimination, micromanagement, or other toxic workplace behaviours. Rather than expecting employees to develop thicker skin, organisations must establish clear expectations for professional conduct and enforce them consistently at all levels of the hierarchy.
This includes creating accessible reporting mechanisms, thoroughly investigating concerns, and implementing appropriate consequences for behaviours that undermine psychological safety, regardless of the perpetrator’s position or performance.
Empower Employees to Set Boundaries
Organisations should not merely permit boundary-setting but actively encourage it as essential for sustainable performance. Leaders should model healthy work behaviours themselves, such as taking proper breaks, logging off at reasonable hours, using holiday time, and respecting mental health needs.
When leaders demonstrate these behaviours and explicitly support them in their teams, employees feel empowered to maintain boundaries that protect their well-being without fearing negative career consequences.
Your Alternative: Instead of telling employees to “be more resilient” in the face of toxic behaviours or unsustainable demands, create a psychologically safe culture where resilience isn’t constantly needed just to survive. Invest in cultural assessment tools to identify problematic patterns, train all employees in constructive communication practices, and establish clear expectations for behaviour that supports collective well-being.
Make Work Meaningful & Engaging
People naturally demonstrate greater resilience when they find genuine purpose and meaning in their work. Instead of focusing exclusively on making people “tougher,” organisations should help employees feel genuinely connected to and engaged with what they do.
Give Employees More Autonomy
Micromanagement doesn’t just frustrate employees, it actively drains their energy and undermines their natural resilience. Organisations should trust people to do their jobs, providing clear outcomes and expectations while allowing flexibility in how those outcomes are achieved.
This autonomy not only improves engagement and satisfaction but also allows employees to work in ways that align with their individual strengths and preferences, reducing unnecessary strain and making resilience less necessary.
Connect Work to a Bigger Purpose
People thrive when they understand how their contributions matter within the larger organisational context. Leaders should regularly communicate how specific tasks and projects connect to broader organisational goals and social impact, helping employees see the meaning behind their daily work.
This sense of purpose serves as a natural resilience booster, helping people navigate challenges with greater perspective and motivation than when work feels disconnected from any meaningful outcome.
Recognise & Reward Contributions
Genuine appreciation fuels motivation and engagement far more effectively than telling someone to “push through” difficult circumstances. Organisations should implement regular, meaningful recognition practices that acknowledge both achievements and efforts, particularly during challenging periods.
This recognition doesn’t need to be elaborate or expensive, specific, timely verbal acknowledgment from a respected leader can be extraordinarily powerful in helping employees maintain their natural resilience during difficult times.
Your Alternative: Focus on job design that enhances engagement and intrinsic motivation. Conduct “purpose audits” to identify disconnects between daily tasks and meaningful outcomes, then redesign roles to strengthen these connections. Implement regular career conversations that help align individual purpose with organisational needs.
Conclusion
It’s time to stop telling employees to “be more resilient” and start asking deeper questions:
❓ Why do we need so much resilience in the first place?
❓ How can we make work healthier, fairer, and more fulfilling?
❓ What do we need to change in leadership, job design, and culture to better support our people?
Real leadership is not about demanding resilience, it’s about creating an environment where extreme resilience isn’t constantly required just to survive. If organisations focus on fixing broken systems rather than “fixing” employees, they will create happier, healthier, and more engaged workplaces where resilience is a natural byproduct, not a survival skill.
This approach doesn’t mean eliminating all workplace challenges or protecting employees from any difficulty. Challenge and growth are essential components of engaging work. But there’s a profound difference between the positive stress of tackling meaningful challenges with adequate support and the chronic distress of navigating broken systems, toxic behaviours, or impossible demands.
By building organisations that fundamentally support human thriving rather than constantly depleting it, we create workplaces that are not only more humane but ultimately more innovative, adaptive, and successful. The resilience that emerges from such environments is far more powerful and sustainable than anything that could be developed through individual training alone.
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This article is the first in a two-part series on resilience. The second part will address the individual’s role in developing sustainable resilience within organisational contexts.
