Resilience must be one of the most misunderstood issues affecting businesses right now. It’s used whenever people are struggling, and almost always aimed at the individual – be tougher, manage your stress, build a bit more grit. During countless conversations with leaders and teams over the last few years it has been seen that those words do real damage to people who are trying hard to do their best. When tiredness is no longer fixed by a weekend, when feedback lands as a threat, and when change is met with a sigh, it gets recorded under ‘poor personal resilience’, effectively telling people the problem is with them. I don’t think it is. I think we’re looking in the wrong place.
Studying one of the few settings where resilience has been measured properly illustrates the point. In the year to March 2025, mental ill-health accounted for 47.1 percent of long-term sickness absence across the UK Civil Service. It was the single largest cause, by some way. What’s astonishing isn’t the size of that number, it’s the spread. It doesn’t sit in one age group, one grade, one type of job. And when a workforce that large and that structured shows the same pattern everywhere, the story that a generation has gone soft – falls apart. Something structural is going on, but we continue to talk about individuals.
We skip past the fact that a great deal of how we work was built for conditions that no longer exist. For most of the last century, work could assume steady attention, predictable routines, clear hierarchies, and personal identities that formed slowly inside the organisation. Almost none of that is true now. Attention has become fragmented as multiple sources of infomation compete for our attention. The line between work and life isn’t just blurred, it has gone. Roles ask for judgement, interpretation and emotional regulation as much as any technical skill. People arrive at work shaped by a stimulating, fast paced, socially conscious and personal brand-focused world. In most cases the world of work is failing to respond to these deep rooted changes.
AI is adding to the problem but not always in the way people assume. Most of the strain created has little to do with today’s workload. For those who really understand it, there’s a persistent awareness that something big is coming – roles will move, skills will be re-valued, status up for re-negotiation. That’s stress about a future you can’t ignore, not a task in front of you.
Many know AI matters but aren’t yet confident with it, it’s the opposite kind of ache — the sense of being a step behind and unsure how to close the gap. Underneath they amount to the same thing, uncertainty that no one has helped people to process, and the questions are far more personal than we care to admit. When a machine can do the thing that used to make you good at your job “What am I here for?” stops being philosophical. It becomes an identity question. Unprocessed identity threats of any type produce behaviours such as avoidance, rigidity, self-protection, anxiety and exhaustion.
It helps to remember how people handle pressure. Ambiguity, criticism and social uncertainty all trip the brain’s threat response. But give someone time, context and a little self-awareness and they start to read those signals differently, feel the pressure as a challenge, recover, and turn it into learning. That loop is how humans adapt. The trouble is that modern work strips out the conditions that loop needs. Working memory is a finite and clumsy tool, constant switching and vague requests eat the capacity that should go to judgement and recovery. Remove the informal cues on top of that — the corridor conversation, the read of someone’s face — and people are left interpreting silence and carrying a low background hum that never quite switches off. Stress stops being an event, it becomes the weather. Attention then switches to more simulating and comforting sources.
This doesn’t mean that pressure is the enemy, far from it. The right amount, handled well, is exactly how engagement and learning are stimulated. Some workplace systems build resilience almost by accident. Watch a good hospitality team: continuous micro-stress and micro-recovery, instant feedback, real problems solved in real time, plenty of human contact and small wins that let people reset before the next thing lands.
Plenty of corporate environments have, with the best intention, engineered all that out — swapping informal conversation for scheduled calls, breaks for ‘quick check-ins’, and examination of mistakes for an annual review that surprises everyone in the room.
We’ve stripped out the friction, but we haven’t noticed we were stripping out the very moments when resilience was being built.
The signs a system is straining are plain to see. Meetings held to prepare for other meetings. Decisions re-opened rather than made. New starters take months to feel they belong. Change met with “here we go again”. On their own, each looks like a local irritation. Together, they are telling you the system no longer supports the interpretation, recovery and adaptation people need to sustain or build resilience.
Viewing low employee resilience as a workplace design flaw means we don’t need another wellbeing initiative bolted onto a system that is failing to evolve. Instead, we should be treating resilience as something we can build by re- designing elements of our workplaces, not something we demand from individuals. This means asking different questions than we those we are used to asking. Do the rhythms of work leave any room to recover? Can expectations be communicated clearly enough to reduce ambiguity?
Are managers properly equipped for the emotional weight the job now hands them, or are they simply absorbing it? Are the technologies working for the people using them? Answering these questions, can improve resilience, regardless of personality type, age, role or social background.
The question is, what is our workplace doing to wear resilience down? And what do we have to change to build it back up?
Carl Lyon is a co-founder of the Fellowship of Responsible Business and a facilitator and executive coach. For more than twenty years he has worked on customer, employee and digital experience with over 200 organisations, moving from a background in engineering into people-focused leadership and coaching. He is known for making complex problems feel navigable and for knowing which questions to ask.
August 16, 2026
Is resilience a personality trait or a flaw in workplace design?
by Carl Lyon • Comment, Wellbeing, Workplace design
Studying one of the few settings where resilience has been measured properly illustrates the point. In the year to March 2025, mental ill-health accounted for 47.1 percent of long-term sickness absence across the UK Civil Service. It was the single largest cause, by some way. What’s astonishing isn’t the size of that number, it’s the spread. It doesn’t sit in one age group, one grade, one type of job. And when a workforce that large and that structured shows the same pattern everywhere, the story that a generation has gone soft – falls apart. Something structural is going on, but we continue to talk about individuals.
We skip past the fact that a great deal of how we work was built for conditions that no longer exist. For most of the last century, work could assume steady attention, predictable routines, clear hierarchies, and personal identities that formed slowly inside the organisation. Almost none of that is true now. Attention has become fragmented as multiple sources of infomation compete for our attention. The line between work and life isn’t just blurred, it has gone. Roles ask for judgement, interpretation and emotional regulation as much as any technical skill. People arrive at work shaped by a stimulating, fast paced, socially conscious and personal brand-focused world. In most cases the world of work is failing to respond to these deep rooted changes.
AI is adding to the problem but not always in the way people assume. Most of the strain created has little to do with today’s workload. For those who really understand it, there’s a persistent awareness that something big is coming – roles will move, skills will be re-valued, status up for re-negotiation. That’s stress about a future you can’t ignore, not a task in front of you.
Many know AI matters but aren’t yet confident with it, it’s the opposite kind of ache — the sense of being a step behind and unsure how to close the gap. Underneath they amount to the same thing, uncertainty that no one has helped people to process, and the questions are far more personal than we care to admit. When a machine can do the thing that used to make you good at your job “What am I here for?” stops being philosophical. It becomes an identity question. Unprocessed identity threats of any type produce behaviours such as avoidance, rigidity, self-protection, anxiety and exhaustion.
It helps to remember how people handle pressure. Ambiguity, criticism and social uncertainty all trip the brain’s threat response. But give someone time, context and a little self-awareness and they start to read those signals differently, feel the pressure as a challenge, recover, and turn it into learning. That loop is how humans adapt. The trouble is that modern work strips out the conditions that loop needs. Working memory is a finite and clumsy tool, constant switching and vague requests eat the capacity that should go to judgement and recovery. Remove the informal cues on top of that — the corridor conversation, the read of someone’s face — and people are left interpreting silence and carrying a low background hum that never quite switches off. Stress stops being an event, it becomes the weather. Attention then switches to more simulating and comforting sources.
This doesn’t mean that pressure is the enemy, far from it. The right amount, handled well, is exactly how engagement and learning are stimulated. Some workplace systems build resilience almost by accident. Watch a good hospitality team: continuous micro-stress and micro-recovery, instant feedback, real problems solved in real time, plenty of human contact and small wins that let people reset before the next thing lands.
Plenty of corporate environments have, with the best intention, engineered all that out — swapping informal conversation for scheduled calls, breaks for ‘quick check-ins’, and examination of mistakes for an annual review that surprises everyone in the room.
We’ve stripped out the friction, but we haven’t noticed we were stripping out the very moments when resilience was being built.
The signs a system is straining are plain to see. Meetings held to prepare for other meetings. Decisions re-opened rather than made. New starters take months to feel they belong. Change met with “here we go again”. On their own, each looks like a local irritation. Together, they are telling you the system no longer supports the interpretation, recovery and adaptation people need to sustain or build resilience.
Viewing low employee resilience as a workplace design flaw means we don’t need another wellbeing initiative bolted onto a system that is failing to evolve. Instead, we should be treating resilience as something we can build by re- designing elements of our workplaces, not something we demand from individuals. This means asking different questions than we those we are used to asking. Do the rhythms of work leave any room to recover? Can expectations be communicated clearly enough to reduce ambiguity?
Are managers properly equipped for the emotional weight the job now hands them, or are they simply absorbing it? Are the technologies working for the people using them? Answering these questions, can improve resilience, regardless of personality type, age, role or social background.
The question is, what is our workplace doing to wear resilience down? And what do we have to change to build it back up?
Carl Lyon is a co-founder of the Fellowship of Responsible Business and a facilitator and executive coach. For more than twenty years he has worked on customer, employee and digital experience with over 200 organisations, moving from a background in engineering into people-focused leadership and coaching. He is known for making complex problems feel navigable and for knowing which questions to ask.