Employee stress has changed radically over the past decade due to increased demands both at work and at home. Meanwhile, organizations and their workforces continue to experience the unpredictability of global economic pressures, political concerns, wars and, closer to home, personal finance fears and mental health challenges, all potentially leading to increased anxiety, burnout and injury.
As professional life has become faster paced, the risk of work-related stress has also been magnified. In 2019, the World Health Organization included burnout in its International Classification of Diseases, defining it as an occupational phenomenon characterized by exhaustion, mental distance from one’s job and reduced professional efficacy. In a 2021 follow-up study, the American Psychological Association found that 79% of adult workers surveyed experienced work-related stress in the month prior, and three out of five described being negatively impacted—lacking motivation, energy and interest—due to stress at work.
According to a recent study by the University of Massachusetts Lowell, work-related stress takes a significant toll on employees and companies alike. From health care costs to absenteeism and poor performance, the financial impact of job-related stress is estimated to be more than $300 billion a year, with absenteeism alone costing larger corporations roughly $3.6 million a year.
To minimize losses and improve workforce culture and wellbeing, it is essential to understand how to build a resilient workforce and to implement strategies to mitigate the impact of stress and burnout. To do so, leaders must be able to navigate the root causes of these impacts. Building a resilient workforce culture is critical in enabling workers to act and think quickly and demonstrate the flexibility to move forward when businesses face uncertainty.
Promoting Workforce Resiliency
Resiliency is the ability to recover from or adjust easily to adversity or change. For David Moore, a risk management professional in the entertainment and outdoor recreation industries, supporting workers is one way a company can successfully execute corporate resiliency initiatives. “In the simplest of terms, resiliency is another word for ensuring employees have a balanced life,” he said. He approaches resiliency as an opportunity to look at the whole person and drill down what is important to them.
“There is a human cost when we ask employees to constantly go above and beyond without recognizing how these cumulative stressors impact them, or providing resources to help people move through their day to perform work without injury or burnout,” Moore said. “As employers, it is important to realize people have lives beyond the ‘9-to-5.’”
When an organization fosters team resiliency, employees are more likely to be engaged, feel committed and work harder toward company targets. While this should not be a defined goal, it should be built into company initiatives and performance metrics because building a resilient workforce has a positive effect on employee well-being and job performance. “It’s a ‘you care, I care’ tactic,” he said. “But it must come from a place of authenticity and align with your corporate culture or it will not work.”
The following five resiliency strategies can help reinforce wellness as part of a company’s core beliefs and assure workers that there are critical resources available to help them thrive personally and professionally.
1. Create a Sustainable Environment
To protect a workforce's mental health and wellbeing, organizations must understand that stress, burnout, injury and attrition are avoidable. Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, founder and director of the Trauma Stewardship Institute, believes that business leaders have a moral mandate to create conditions and systems that enable people to do their job. “It is problematic when environments are not sustainable, which results in the challenges being off-loaded on the individual worker,” she said.
While under-resourcing and deadline pressure are some of the most common difficulties organizations face, Lipsky does not believe these headwinds should hinder the creation of a culture where burnout is no longer commonplace. “If we assume [the company culture] does not begin with malintent, then leaders can start assessing their work culture with common sense,” she said. For example, organizations should review what leaders are asking workers to do and determine if mandated timeframes and deadlines are realistic.
This is where leadership can demonstrate transparency and gain trust with workers. Leaders should explain the challenges the business is facing, the reasons for a particular push to succeed, the underlying resource issue a department is experiencing, or any other event that is impacting the organization’s patterns for work. For example, in one-on-one conversations with workers, managers can assess how a team member is feeling about the current pace and volume. Being clear about what is happening instills trust and effectively acknowledges that, while the current workload is not the norm, for now it is the expectation.
Another opportunity to get this message across to employees is at regularly scheduled team syncs, such as monthly company meetings. By acknowledging the heavy lift employees are performing, leaders set the stage for collective problem-solving, which fosters a collaborative environment.
2. Establish an Employee Resilience Team
There is tremendous value in establishing a cross-functional team that is tasked with inspiring a resilient workforce. Their role is to identify strategies and opportunities that encourage and protect employee resiliency, like addressing how to build the capacity to deal with change, how to motivate workers when deadlines and initiatives are temporarily overwhelming and how to stave off burnout.
“It is about fostering a work culture that thrives in the face of adversity,” Moore said. However, he cautioned that the resiliency team must work for employees, meaning resiliency should not be a tightly defined directive. It must be fluid to inspire adaptability and flexibility within an organization.
While it can be difficult to determine the key attributes of a resilient employee or workforce, Moore believes that does not matter when it comes to delivery. “In many ways, it is about perspective and workforce resilience can be cultivated through example as well as having wellbeing resources available,” he said. The goal is that, through consistent support and a willingness to pivot away from overwork and exhaustion, companies can eventually ingrain resilience into their organizational culture.
Moore also recommends local delivery of resiliency initiatives, particularly for companies that have a multi-state or global footprint. “While you can centralize the concepts of what resiliency looks like for your company, you cannot centralize the execution of it,” he said. In every region within a global structure, resident workers experience differing lifestyle and cultural impacts. “What is really important is connecting with people on a personal experience level,” Moore said. That must be done in a program that considers the whole person, including where they live and what they value.
3. Demonstrate Corporate Empathy and Compassion
Employers should never underestimate the importance of leaders showing empathy and compassion. “Affirming that something is hard or imperfect is powerful,” Lipsky said. Further, communication must be frequent, consistent and genuine.
Whether a message is delivered at a monthly corporate meeting or in a weekly email from the C-suite, it is important to acknowledge what is happening. In her consulting and workshop practice, Lipsky encourages leaders to be honest with their organization. “It interrupts people’s loneliness or feeling of isolation,” she said. Managers should engage with staff to determine engagement and reactions about workload, and ask open-ended questions like “How are you feeling about your current work?” and “What’s been the biggest challenge for you?”
When employees are feeling overwhelmed and experiencing symptoms of stress and burnout, reducing their feelings of isolation can help workers feel seen and heard, and can demonstrate that every employee is part of the whole. That connection to the workplace is the foundation of a resilient organization.
To do this well, Lipsky suggests messaging that speaks to the reality of the situation, such as “If you are feeling these things, you are not alone,” “There are larger forces at play that are impacting the organization that are not just impacting you but everyone” and “Feeling overwhelmed is real and you are in good company.”
4. Consider Past Lessons About Work-Life Balance
Employers looking to build resiliency among their workforce should consider the lesson learned from the COVID-19 pandemic. “Do we want to return to the inflexibility of a traditional work week? Does that benefit your organization or the way your workers do their job?” Moore said. “Time is important to people and it is equally important for organizations to give consideration to time.”
This means corporations should factor in the daily activities of their workers, both on and off work. Organizational resiliency is about determining how to support workers to do their best work. Moore encourages leaders to ask questions of staff and managers. For example, “Are we allowing people to work in a way that is beneficial to their productivity? Does someone do their best work in the morning or the afternoon? Are we able to be flexible when it comes to defined business hours? Can this role be performed during non-traditional hours so a worker can spend the time they need with their family?”
For organizations that do not have the capacity to offer more flexible working hours, Moore encourages giving employees unplanned days off. “As employers, we need to recognize people have lives and there is a huge benefit to rewarding employees with a day off they did not know was coming so they can get life done,” he said.
5. Create Opportunities for Collaboration
In a 2023 advisory, the U.S. Surgeon General warned that loneliness impacts productivity and mental and physical wellness, and suggested that organizations should support workers in order to create connection with others. This connection is crucial to promote a sense of purpose within the work environment.
One tactic to promote relationship-building and combat loneliness is to build a culture of belonging through collaboration. Virtual work and hybrid arrangements have spread workers across numerous locations, which means collaborative technology tools like Teams and Slack are useful in facilitating real-time team communication.
Another strategy to promote partnership is to share departmental and personal goals. Depending on the size of an organization, this can be as simple as a shared spreadsheet setting out everyone’s goals or asking each department to share their goals at a company meeting. Giving a broader voice to goals can improve alignment and understanding across departments, functions and people. With this increased transparency, businesses may be better equipped to motivate employees and increase adaptability while minimizing distractions and competing priorities. In short, an organization can create a “we are all in this together” mentality while still defining individual roles and responsibilities.
Organizations can leverage those technologies to reach workers and share transparent and timely messaging and updates of the organization’s progress toward initiatives and goals. This sets the stage for clearer communication around expectations and such transparency helps eliminate information silos. “Essentially, you are disrupting loneliness,” Moore said.
Committing to Resiliency
Resilience is not easily quantifiable, but when employees are less stressed, they are healthy and energized and the business experiences cost savings due to a decrease in burnout, injury and attrition.
As a result, Moore recommends housing corporate resiliency responsibility under risk management. “Risk management is designed to protect the company’s health and safety,” he said. “Even though resiliency is not easily quantifiable, it can be measured, like grading the human cost of burnout or calculating the cost savings when disaster is avoided.”
Cultivating and protecting employee resilience and wellbeing should be incorporated into every aspect of an organization’s culture. Regardless of where the responsibility for workforce wellness is housed, every corporate goal, pillar or quarterly initiative should include a mechanism to promote resiliency. Over time, this will increase an organization’s ability to adapt in the face of the unique, persistent and unknown challenges.