The mere mention of ‘resilience’ can make some health and wellbeing professionals break out into a hot, angry sweat. Recently, here at Make a Difference Media, we’ve noticed a rising tide of polarisation around this topic.
Resilience as a buzzword rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s when it garnered much interest as skills for individuals to help them manage their stress, with the word ‘burnout’ also at that time being used more and more.
It’s still very much backed by some professionals. In fact, a recent survey we did amongst our readers revealed that it’s a key priority for 2025 when it comes to supporting employee health.
Don’t miss our sister event The Watercooler on 30 April and 1 May 2025 in London where several sessions will be covering the link between resilience and wellbeing. For more details on this event on shaping the future of work, health, wellbeing, culture and innovation, see here.
Emerging backlash against resilience
However, at the same time, there’s been an emerging backlash against resilience since the late 2010s.
Why?
Because resilience has got personal.
The Covid-19 pandemic, in particular, really highlighted the problems with resilience in the eyes of its critics.
Bruce Daisley, formerly Vice President for Europe at Twitter and now a culture consultant, has written a book on resilience, Fortitude: The Myth of Resilience, and the Secrets of Inner Strength. As part of his research, he remembers interviewing a doctor for his book. He describes her rage on seeing a flyer on a noticeboard at her hospital saying ‘resilience webinar’:
“No single sheet of paper has made people more angry in that NHS hospital, she told me. Medical professionals had been working without holidays, cancelling time off, having no sick leave and working day and night for 18 months and now they were starting to have major sickness episodes, or being signed off with stress or even quitting completely. The idea that this was because they were not resilient enough is toxic.”
Shifting responsibility unfairly to individuals
What employees felt the NHS was doing by running this webinar was shifting responsibility for resilience and addressing root issues of the stress away from the organisation to the individuals. Those employees that wanted to get help were worried that if they did, they would be stigmatised and labelled as fragile or unresilient – especially if they dared to say the tick box solutions hadn’t helped.
As Daisley says, what is happening here, is that the employer is “attempting to reframe a toxic, hostile environment as being something that’s perfectly fine”.
A legal professional we spoke to on this topic agrees. Over his career he says he has seen resilience training “evolve and be weaponised” to the extent that, now, it’s used to “victim blame and add a certain element of shame”.
Resilience has got personal
His anger is palpable when he remembers a story in a previous job when resilience got really personal – and toxic.
He was sitting around a table with a group of fellow line managers discussing employee performance and bonuses:
“I vividly remember one of my peers saying ‘this guy has been really resilient this year’. He was talking about a black employee who had been on a project with a racist client who told the company they didn’t want to work with him. He was taken off the project and was really calm about it. Didn’t complain. And that was defined as resilient. I thought that was so wrong to be praising an employee for accepting our organisation being fine with racism, rather than saying we won’t work with racist clients.”
Praise for ‘sucking it up’
He believes resilience has largely got to this point, where “we’re praising individuals for sucking it up, being ‘thick skinned’ and being brave about things being a bit rubbish”.
While the word ‘resilience’ may have acquired negative connotations for some people, there’s no doubt about it that – with the many challenges in today’s business environment – organisations need to be resilient to thrive. But, assuming there’s some validity in the criticisms of resilience, where do we go forward from here in creating cultures that recover quickly from difficult circumstances?
The answer brings us back – again – to the central theme of last year’s Mad World Summit: the balance between organisational and individual responsibility. This was discussed at length by many experts and, in most cases, it was agreed you cannot have one without the other.
Where does responsibility lie?
Arguably, when it comes to resilience, you could say that it’s more important that an employer creates an environment that enables resilience to flourish than for an individual to acquire skills to be resilient. Why? Because even the most resilient worker has a breaking point if an environment has enough stressors. However, you still can’t have one without the other.
Chris Tamdjidi is co-Managing Director of Awaris, a mindfulness and resilience consultancy, and author of The Resilient Culture: How Collective Resilience Leads to Business Success. He says you can even pinpoint when this ‘breaking’ tipping point happens, when the stressors become too much for individual agency. He argues that up until this point, it’s more effective if the individual takes action than if the employer does:
“If you look at the numbers, up to a certain level of stressors it’s more effective for the individuals to learn resilience skills than it is for the employer to intervene. However, there is a certain measurable point when it doesn’t make sense anymore because the individual taking action doesn’t make a difference, so you have to change the system. The fact that you can determine that point, where responsibility shifts, based on data, is a nuance that is important but overlooked often. Overall, it’s always a shared responsibility.”
Employees are not equal when it comes to stressors
He takes the example of himself – a “typical white male with a heavy workload and financial security” – and says that the number of stressors he faces are bound to be less, for instance, than a “black woman, living in an inner city with a heavy workload and financial uncertainty”.
A gender imbalance has been apparent in a number of companies he’s worked for when this analysis is done. The employer might say ‘we’d like to have more women in management’ but when stressors are analysed, it’s clear these women face more than their male counterparts.
“So to balance the playing field you do have to do more for them,” he says. “You do have to support them and offer them more tailored tools to support them. It’s not that they’re not strong. It’s not about disempowering them, or judging them. It’s about facing reality and acknowledging that they face a higher stress load and so might need more support to be as resilient.”
Stressors can be non-work related
The other thing that quickly becomes apparent when doing analysis of stressors is, as Tamdjidi says, that there are many “private issues”, not related to work, that are “pushing people over the edge”. This gives fuel to the argument that resilience is an individual’s responsibility as much as an organisation’s.
Once employees understand their stressors they are more likely to “get onboard” and recognise they have “some responsibility”, but they also want to feel their employer is taking its responsibility seriously, too.
One of the most powerful actions an employer can take to increase the resilience of its workforce is to create strong social connections between employees. The biggest ‘truth’ Daisley learnt from his book research on resilience is that: “you can’t be resilient on your own; resilience is the strength we draw from each other”.
Social connections build resilience at work
However, social connections need time and space to flourish and, over the last few years, “we’ve cut the slack in the system because of VC owners, or owners who want to make more profit”. As Daisley says, particularly post Covid, jobs have been merged to be done by less people.
“As a result, work intensity has gone up and work just feels more stressful, more lonely,” he says. “Of course, for bosses, this is not always the answer they want to hear. They would much rather hear that they can send employees on a resilience course and feel like they’ve ticked a box. Then, if anything goes wrong, they can say ‘oh, so sorry to hear this, we did send your team on that resilience programme’.”
Social wellbeing needs slack in the system
Also post Covid, overworking at home and back to back online meetings have become a norm for many office workers, further stripping out any slack in the system. If we want our workforces to be more resilient, we must find ways of giving people breathing space such as having shorter and more productive meetings, keeping those cc’d into emails to a minimum, creating teams where people feel confident to speak up if they are struggling and respecting people’s holidays so that they have time to recharge. As Jo Forbes, Health, Safety and Wellbeing Strategy Manager at Osborne Clarke, says:
“Resilient means that when you face challenging times, you’re able to bounce back. But if your employees don’t have time to bounce back because they’re constantly in a state of stress, they will inevitably struggle. Humans aren’t designed to have to be constantly resilient. So if someone is struggling in that environment, it’s not a failure on their part. It’s a failure on the environment’s part. At that point, resilience training is just a distraction from the elephant in the room. Instead, move the focus away from the individual and onto your working environment, and develop a culture which fosters resilient, thriving teams.”
Don’t miss our sister event The Watercooler on 30 April and 1 May 2025 in London where several sessions will be covering the link between resilience and wellbeing, including Ellie Orton, sharing where resilience fits in with NHS Charities Together’s ‘psychological safety’ initiatives, a panel exploring where resilience fits with proactively supporting global employee health and wellbeing and Yelp’s Chief Diversity Officer shining a light on how storytelling is helping to build resilience and enhance remote work culture. For more details on this event on shaping the future of work, health, wellbeing, culture and innovation, see here.
