What are your people being asked to be resilient to?

There is something slightly odd about the way we talk about wellbeing at work.

It is often treated as an addition to the organisation: something that sits alongside strategy, operations, finance and performance. There is the work itself, with its deadlines, targets, meetings, structures and pressures, and then there is wellbeing, where we talk about stress, resilience, mental health and perhaps offer people tools to cope with everything in the first category.

I teach many of those tools myself. I believe in movement, breath, recovery, self-awareness and learning how to regulate ourselves under pressure. They can make a profound difference to how someone experiences and responds to a difficult day.

But the more I work in this field, the harder I find it to separate wellbeing from the work itself.

The World Health Organization estimates that depression and anxiety result in 12 billion lost working days every year, at a cost of around US$1 trillion in lost productivity. Among the workplace risks it identifies are excessive workloads, low job control, job insecurity, discrimination and inequality.

These are not particularly surprising findings. Most of us know what a badly designed working environment feels like. What is interesting is how long an organisation can continue to function while people are struggling inside it.

Someone can be exhausted and still answer their emails. They can sit through meetings, finish the presentation and meet the deadline. They may even continue performing well enough that nobody notices what it is costing them.

This is one reason absence tells us so little on its own.

Deloitte estimated in 2024 that poor mental health costs UK employers approximately £51 billion a year. Around £24 billion of that was attributed to presenteeism: people remaining at work while experiencing mental-health difficulties that affect their performance.

I find presenteeism particularly interesting because much of its cost is difficult to see.

It may appear in the decision someone makes too quickly because they no longer have the mental space to think properly. In the manager whose patience has shortened over six months of relentless pressure. In the experienced employee who stops challenging questionable decisions because speaking up has become one more thing requiring energy. In the creative problem that receives the first workable solution rather than the best one.

None of those people necessarily looks unwell. They may simply become less capable of doing the kind of thinking their organisation depends upon.

There is now a substantial body of evidence connecting how people experience work with how organisations perform. Researchers associated with Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre analysed 339 independent studies covering almost 1.9 million employees, more than 82,000 business units, 230 organisations and 49 industries. They found positive associations between employee wellbeing and productivity, customer loyalty and profitability, alongside a negative association with staff turnover.

Those findings do not mean that improving employee wellbeing automatically produces higher profits. Association is not causation, and successful organisations may themselves create conditions that improve wellbeing. But the scale of the evidence makes the old division between the “people stuff” and the “business stuff” increasingly difficult to defend.

The people are doing the business. Their attention, judgment, creativity, relationships and ability to make good decisions under pressure are part of the organisation's productive capacity.

Pressure isn't the problem

This is also where workplace wellbeing can become a bit too simplistic. A healthy organisation is not one in which nobody experiences stress. Deadlines focus us. Difficult problems stretch us. Responsibility can feel heavy precisely because we care about getting something right. Some of the most satisfying periods of work are also demanding ones.

Our bodies are capable of responding remarkably well to challenge. Under pressure, physiological systems mobilise energy and attention towards what needs dealing with. For a defined period, that can be super useful.

The difficulty comes when there is too little opportunity to come back down. One deadline runs into the next. A busy month becomes a busy quarter. Teams remain understaffed because somehow they are still delivering. The person who is particularly good in a crisis becomes the person given every crisis. Evening messages become normal enough that nobody needs to explicitly say they are expected anymore.

Gradually, exceptional effort becomes the baseline against which ordinary effort is judged.

This is where I think some conversations about resilience go wrong. Resilience is valuable, really valuable. We need the capacity to recover from difficulty, adapt to change and continue functioning when life does not cooperate with our plans. I would never argue for making people less resilient. But resilience can become a convenient organisational word because it places the unit of change inside the employee.

If somebody is struggling, maybe they need better coping strategies. Or better boundaries. More sleep. Exercise. Meditation. A breathing practice. Time management. Any of those things may help... They may also leave the central problem completely untouched.

A person can learn an excellent breathing technique and still report to a manager who humiliates people in meetings. Someone can meditate every morning and still have a workload that routinely requires twelve-hour days. An employee can be told to establish boundaries while watching the people who answer emails at 22:00 receive praise for their commitment.

Eventually people learn more from what an organisation rewards than from what it says.

WHO's recommendations on mental health at work reflect this. They include interventions aimed at individuals, but they also call for organisational interventions that modify working conditions, alongside manager training and support for workers.

That changes the question. Instead of beginning with How do we make our people more resilient?, an organisation might first become curious about what its people are being asked to be resilient to.

Sometimes the answer will simply be the legitimate difficulty of the work. A surgeon cannot remove the emotional weight of surgery. A leader cannot make a restructuring painless. A start-up cannot eliminate uncertainty from building something that may fail.

But some pressure is created unnecessarily. Unclear priorities create work. Poor decisions create work. Meetings create work. Constant switching creates work. Managers who cannot delegate create work. Cultures in which everything is urgent create work. Avoiding a difficult conversation for six months creates work for everyone around it. And because that work does not always appear on a project plan, organisations can underestimate how much capacity it consumes.

The conditions underneath burnout

Christina Maslach's decades of research on burnout are useful here because they move the conversation beyond the idea of an employee who simply became too stressed.

Her work has identified recurring areas of mismatch between people and their work: workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values.

The usefulness of that framework is easy to see. Workload is important, but two people with similar workloads may experience them very differently if one has meaningful control over how the work gets done and the other does not.

Recognition matters, but so does fairness. A team can tolerate an extraordinarily demanding period when people understand why it is happening, trust one another and believe the burden is being shared. The same workload can become corrosive when sacrifice seems arbitrary or consistently falls on the same people.

Values matter too. There is a particular kind of exhaustion in repeatedly being asked to work in ways that conflict with what you believe good work should look like. This begins to explain why adding a wellbeing benefit to an unhealthy environment often feels insufficient. The intervention may be addressing someone's response to work while the organisation continues producing the conditions driving that response.

A useful wellbeing strategy therefore has to travel upstream. Where is work regularly spilling into people's recovery time? Which teams repeatedly lose good employees? Where do people have responsibility without enough authority to fulfil it? What happens when somebody says they do not have capacity? Which behaviours actually earn status inside the organisation? Can people disagree with someone senior without paying for it later? Do managers know when their teams are under sustained pressure, or only when somebody finally breaks?

The answers tell us far more about organisational wellbeing than the existence of a wellness programme.

There is still a person in the system

None of this makes an employer responsible for every aspect of someone's wellbeing. That would be neither realistic nor particularly empowering.

We bring our histories, habits, relationships, personalities and lives into work. Two people can encounter the same situation and respond differently. We have some responsibility for understanding ourselves and developing the skills that allow us to navigate difficulty. I have become increasingly interested in that capacity: noticing what pressure does to us before it makes our decisions for us.

Can I recognise when my attention is narrowing? Can I notice that I am becoming defensive before I send the email? Can I recover after a demanding day rather than carrying the entire day into the evening? Can I communicate that I am approaching capacity before frustration starts communicating it on my behalf?

Movement, sleep, relationships, reflection, breathing practices and time away from work can all contribute to that capacity.

There is something extremely valuable about giving people more agency over how they experience and respond to pressure. The problem comes when that agency is used to excuse conditions that would steadily exhaust almost anyone.

I think the healthiest model sits somewhere more mature than assigning responsibility entirely to either side. People can develop greater capacity to manage themselves. Organisations can become more thoughtful about how much of that capacity they consume.

What would we do differently?

If wellbeing genuinely affects performance, it needs to sit much closer to the way work is designed and managed. That could start with looking at where pressure actually accumulates. Not simply asking employees whether they feel stressed, but examining what happens around the answer.

If one team is routinely working into the evening, is there genuinely too much work, or are priorities unclear enough that everything feels urgent? If good people keep leaving the same department, what is happening there? If employees say they have autonomy, how many decisions can they actually make without approval? When somebody says they are at capacity, does something come off their plate or is the expectation simply that they find a way?

Even the calendar can tell you something. A team may complain that there is no time to think while spending twenty hours a week in meetings. The answer may have little to do with teaching better time management and much more to do with asking why seven people attend a meeting that requires three.

The same applies to recovery. An organisation can have a perfectly good policy about disconnecting after work while senior people continue sending emails late at night and praising those who respond. The written policy matters less than the behaviour that earns recognition. Changing that might mean agreeing what genuinely constitutes an after-hours emergency, delaying non-urgent emails until the next morning, or having leaders visibly model the boundaries they say they support.

Workload deserves similar scrutiny. A demanding quarter is not necessarily a failure of wellbeing. Businesses have deadlines and difficult periods. The problem is when temporary overextension quietly becomes normal operating capacity. If a team can only meet its targets because people repeatedly work evenings and weekends, the organisation is learning the wrong lesson from the fact that the targets were met.

Management behaviour belongs here too. Someone can have a manageable workload and still spend enormous energy navigating a manager whose reactions are unpredictable, avoiding conflict in a team or trying to work out which version of a constantly changing priority is current. Training managers to recognise sustained pressure, have honest workload conversations, respond constructively to bad news and give people appropriate control over their work is as much a wellbeing intervention as anything labelled wellbeing.

Then there are the individual skills. People still benefit from understanding what pressure does to their attention, behaviour and bodies. They can learn to recognise their own patterns earlier, communicate capacity more effectively, recover deliberately, regulate themselves in difficult moments and develop healthier boundaries around work.

A breathing practice might be exactly what helps someone settle themselves before a difficult conversation. The organisation still has to make it safe enough to have the conversation. This is why I don't think there is a universal workplace wellbeing programme. The useful intervention depends on what is actually happening.

For one organisation, the biggest gain may come from reducing unnecessary meetings. For another, it may be clearer decision rights, additional capacity, better manager training, more predictable workloads or addressing a culture in which people are afraid to speak honestly. Somewhere else, employees may have reasonable working conditions but lack the skills to manage pressure and recover well.

The starting point comes before choosing an initiative:

Find out where human capacity is being unnecessarily consumed, understand why, and intervene as close to the cause as possible.

The evidence also suggests that investment here can make economic sense. Deloitte's 2024 review of studies reporting financial returns estimated an average return of approximately £4.70 for every £1 invested in employee mental-health interventions, with greater returns associated with earlier and organisation-wide approaches. It is an average drawn from a body of research, not a guaranteed return on every wellbeing initiative, but it does make the idea of wellbeing as an indulgent cost increasingly difficult to sustain.

Still, I hesitate to reduce the whole argument to return on investment.

People spend an extraordinary proportion of their lives at work. What happens there travels into sleep and relationships, into the patience someone has left when they get home, into how they feel on Sunday afternoon and how much of themselves remains available for the parts of life that do not appear on a company balance sheet.

Work can travel home in better ways too. Good work can give us purpose, relationships, confidence, mastery and a sense that we have contributed to something beyond ourselves. WHO recognises these protective qualities of decent work as well.

Most people do not need work to be easy. Many of us actively want work that asks something of us. We want difficult problems, responsibility, growth and the satisfaction that comes from becoming genuinely good at something.

What becomes damaging is difficulty without enough control, pressure without recovery, responsibility without authority, sacrifice without fairness, and cultures that repeatedly consume more human capacity than they restore.

That is why I increasingly struggle with the idea of wellbeing as a programme sitting somewhere at the edge of the business. It is already inside the business.

It is there in how work is designed, how managers behave, what gets rewarded, what people can say, how much control they have and what happens after a demanding period. It is also there in the skills each of us develops to understand ourselves, recover and respond well when pressure inevitably comes.

The strongest business case for wellbeing may ultimately be simpler than all the statistics.

The person whose judgment you depend on is the same person experiencing the workload. The manager setting the tone carries their own stress into the room. The brain solving the difficult problem belongs to the body that did or did not recover last night. The employee speaking to your customer is the same human being who has spent the previous six months operating beyond capacity.

We can put wellbeing and performance into different boxes on an organisational chart. Human beings have never been particularly good at keeping them there.

Let's build capacity that creates impact.

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