Resilience is an individual’s ability to recover from or stay well in the face of adversity. In a work setting, this refers to an employee’s capacity to adapt, cope, and respond positively to stressors in the workplace. Resilience can also be viewed at an organisational level, where it includes not only the individuals within the organisation, but also the processes and culture those individuals work with/in. Organisational resilience looks at how well the organisation can adapt to challenges it faces. Individual resilience is a mixture of a relatively stable personal attribute and a variable psychological state that is affected by the situation someone is in. Some people will naturally be more resilient than others, but the onus must not simply be put on employees to ‘toughen up’ and ‘be’ resilient. The context in which people are working, their colleagues, work content, working environment, and organisational factors will all affect their resilience. This means that individual resilience needs to be considered within the context of team and organisational resilience. Employers have a responsibility to support resilience and mitigate mental health risks through preventative measures, such as managing work demands, providing autonomy and voice, and providing a supportive culture. It’s not about just training employees to withstand unhealthy work conditions.  

In the context of the challenging world of work, the ability of employees to cope with adversity and display resilience is essential to individual, team and organisational success and even survival. Resilience helps employees protect and regain their personal resources at work, which in turn protects them from problems like psychological distress, emotional exhaustion and burnout. Research shows that individual resilience is linked not just to employees’ wellbeing and ability to deal with stress, but also their capacity to be proactive and creative at work, their performance on work tasks and the role they play in the organisation. It is also linked to their engagement with and commitment to their work and employer. As an HR professional, you will reap considerable benefits from supporting employees in your organisation to be resilient, both because there will be fewer people management issues to deal with and because you will have a better-performing, more creative and thriving workforce.

To ensure that a resilience intervention will have the intended benefits – and not cause unintended harm – it is advisable to start with small-scale, simple interventions that you monitor carefully and adjust according to how they are working on the ground. Organisations are complex adaptive systems that are constantly changing in response to internal and external influences, so it is important to consider how your chosen approach to resilience will allow for complex adaptation across different parts of the organisation (see this World Health Organization note for more information).

Resilience interventions are less likely to succeed if they are viewed as a stand-alone initiative, so it is worth exploring how to integrate and align them with other activities. For example, many of the resilience interventions available use approaches that closely mirror stress management interventions, so linking any resilience initiatives with your existing or planned stress management may be helpful. Building resilience through good leadership and management needs to be integrated and aligned with existing leadership and management development programmes. Resilience considerations also need to be integrated into wider organisational interventions around culture, structure and business continuity. 

The CIPD evidence review makes it clear that people managers – including senior and line managers – play a crucial role in influencing employee resilience. It is important that managers recognise this and understand the benefit to them of supporting their team to be resilient. This will help them be motivated to play their part in building individual, team and organisational resilience. You can point managers to the CIPD guide for managers on supporting employee resilience to help explain this 

The management behaviours that support resilience and wellbeing in employees are essentially part of general good management and leadership. So, building individual resilience in your workforce is partly about ensuring that your managers are good at leading and managing their teams, and providing effective leadership and management development to boost their capability. Management development is most likely to be successful when it includes a range of methods and is regarded as a process that unfolds over time, so it will be helpful to set up a range of support mechanisms to help line managers develop – for example, coaching and/or mentoring, action learning groups, development workshops or webinars to address specific development needs. You can also offer individual support with anything that managers find challenging or confusing.  

The CIPD evidence review concluded that interventions aimed at enhancing individual resilience have a positive effect. The interventions that have been tested in this research were mostly workshops or training involving techniques to develop self-awareness, critical reflection, relaxation and mindfulness. Most of the programmes studied drew on the principles of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which include developing the capacity to identify our ways of thinking and improving resilience and wellbeing through changing the way we think and behave. The evidence suggests that interventions based on cognitive behavioural techniques and psychological capital tended to have slightly greater effects than other types of intervention (such as stress management). It also suggests that mixed interventions that include a range of techniques have somewhat greater effects. So, when looking at potential training providers or programmes, explore what techniques they include and what evidence base they have been developed from.  

The CIPD evidence review also found that factors such as delivery, facilitation and implementation influence the effectiveness of training interventions. The interventions showing effective outcomes were those that combined workshops or training with related learning and development practices, such as goal-setting, coaching and small group discussions. One-to-one and small face-to-face programmes tended to have stronger effects than classroom and computer-based programmes. When designing your programme, it is worth considering how to build in these supportive practices and create individualised and/or small group learning and development opportunities.  

The CIPD evidence review also suggests that interventions with long sessions and more sessions over a short period are more likely to have a sustained effect, for example, 8–12 sessions over four or five weeks. Do ensure that the intensity of the programme is balanced with the resources available and employees’ capacity to dedicate time to it.