Workplaces invest a lot of resources focusing on employee resilience. They try to hire for it through skillfully crafted interview questions. They pay trainers to teach employees how to bounce back from stress and crisis. Executives even use the term as a rallying cry during corporate townhalls, to encourage employees to push through challenging times.
© Yan Krukau, Pexels
However, the reality is that there are two facets of a truly resilient workplace. Employee resilience, yes. But organizational resilience is even more important.
When we speak of employee resilience, the focus is on the individual—their personal resources, knowledge, and skills that enable them to adapt and recover from challenges. In contrast, organizational resilience operates at the macro level, reflecting the collective strength of the organization’s planning, systems, and processes.
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The two are deeply interdependent: resilient organizations foster resilient employees, and resilient employees, in turn, reinforce organizational resilience. Yet too often, employees are expected to shoulder the full burden of resilience in workplaces where organizational resilience is lacking. In fact an Accenture study of 1600 companies across 18 industries suggests that only an estimated 15% of companies are highly resilient, implying that for many companies organizational resilience is more aspirational than operational.
In this article, I’m going to focus on organizational resilience: what it is and how we can increase it. A definition of resilience that I really appreciate comes from a 2012 Argonne National Laboratory report: “the ability of an entity…to anticipate, resist, absorb, respond to and adapt to and recover from a disturbance.” A disturbance can also be thought of as a stressor or a challenge. Common organizational stressors can include shifts in the industry, loss of revenue or donors, reputational risks, loss of talent, and so much more.
What I like about this definition is it recognizes all facets of resilience: anticipatory, preparatory, response, and recovery. All of which are necessary to build a truly resilient organization.
Anticipatory resilience
Anticipatory resilience involves building in regular opportunities at the leadership level to discuss organizational risks that could affect “business as usual.” This can be done by keeping a pulse on your industry, looking at trends among competitors, and understanding volatility in the levers that allow your business to function, such as government policies, regulations, community shifts, and markets.
Unfortunately, an over-focus on the bottom line keeps leaders with their gaze downward, focused on patterns in spreadsheets and reports, instead of looking up and outwards strategically to see what may be on the horizon. A 2024 PWC pulse survey found that only 11% of Chief Risk Officers and Risk Leaders, whose jobs are to assess organizational risks, spend more time on proactive or anticipatory risks than reactive risks.
Anticipatory resilience activities should be ingrained in the way organizations operate and take place in more formalized settings, like leadership meetings, at a regular cadence. During such meetings leaders can ask the following questions:
- What emerging trends or disruptions could challenge our mission, revenue, or operations in the next 12-36 months?
- If our largest funder or client disappeared tomorrow, what would we do in the next 14, 30, 60, 90+ days?
- What assumptions about our operating environment are we relying on that may no longer hold?
The answers to these questions help to build an action plan for strengthening preparatory resilience. Building anticipatory resilience is not an exercise in doom and gloom, but a disciplined practice of preparing your organization to navigate uncertainty with confidence and clarity.
Preparatory resilience
There are many ways organizations can strengthen preparatory resilience, all linked to the organization’s policies, systems, procedures and management, that strengthen operational functioning and contingency preparedness. Preparatory resilience decreases the likelihood that a challenge occurs or reduces the distress it causes when it does. I’ll use two preparatory aspects of organizational resilience as an illustration: employee well-being and financial resilience.
1. Employee well-being
Organizations often overlook or simply omit employee well-being, which is largely a function of the macro conditions of the organization. At my organization, Yes Well-being Works, we define employee well-being along four aspects: Basic Needs, Psychological Safety, Belonging, and Esteem.
Collectively, fostering employee well-being entails the implementation of operational and management frameworks that intentionally support how employees experience their work which affects their psychological functioning in the workplace.
The reality is that when most organizations enter a crisis many employees are feeling burned out, undervalued, fearful to speak up, and disconnected from the work and their colleagues–they’re in distress, which weakens resilience.
I once gave a keynote to a sub-section of the U.S. Department of Defense on employee well-being. A soldier in the audience raised his hand and said, “But we can’t do this on the field in the middle of warfare.” I responded, “You’re absolutely right! It has to be cultivated before the crisis occurs.”
Organizations interested in building a strong workplace culture rooted in employee well-being can start with assessing the following:
- Are employees empowered with all of the resources they need to do their jobs?
- Do employees speak up when they see a problem, have a question, or need support?
- Are our managers incentivized to use employee-centric strategies, tailoring their approach to each one?
- How do we show employees they are valued in our organization?
- Is work designed in a way that employees constantly have to manage high workloads?
Employee well-being pays dividends during times of stability, by increasing employee productivity. But it’s also key to preparatory resilience in numerous ways.
From our research with clients we have found that when employee well-being is high, employees are more likely to stay, which reduces the likelihood of talent disruptions. When their well-being is high, employees report lower levels of stress during challenging moments, suggesting they are able to be more resilient, staving off signs of distress.
2. Financial resilience
This involves managing cashflow and debt, diversifying revenue, forecasting, and more—processes that can often go overlooked when operating on thin margins. One of the biggest consequences of organizational financial volatility is job loss for employees. Ideally the goal is to avoid such volatility at all, but recall resilience can also involve reducing the impact on employees.
I’ll share an example of the latter from my work with a client. Several years ago a mid-size company reached out to me to support them in designing a minimally traumatic “reduction in force,” which is sometimes called a RIF in the human resources space. They lost a large source of revenue and as a result had no choice but to layoff a sizable portion of their staff.
Together, we designed a process that provided the affected employees with five months’ notice, internal support, outplacement services, severance, and extended benefits. The employees who were not laid off also received support to cope and manage with a common trend in layoffs—survivor’s guilt, which involves feeling guilty because you were able to keep your job. The company was unable to avoid the financial shock, but through financial pipelining and planning efforts they were able to mitigate the impact on employees.
The challenge with the preparatory aspects of resilience—like employee well-being or financial resilience, which ultimately protect employees—is that in an at-will work environment, employers are not incentivized to invest in this form of resilience. Those that do, do so of their own volition and internal values. There are no national laws in the U.S. (as there are in Europe) that says employers have to consider the psychological and financial well-being of employees (although there is momentum gaining for the Workplace Psychological Safety Act). Thus, if preparatory resilience isn’t hard baked into the organization’s values, it often goes overlooked.
Responsive resilience
Responsive resilience describes how organizations respond once a challenge is already underway. When anticipatory and preparatory efforts fall short—as they inevitably sometimes do—the question becomes: What happens next?
In many organizations, the reflex is panic, cascading from the top down. Panic is a form of distress that constrains the very cognitive capacities—discernment, judgment, and clear decision-making—that are most needed during crisis. At the organizational level, panic often shows up in predictable ways:
- Leadership defensiveness: Organizational leaders lashing out at employees or assigning blame without fully understanding the complexity of the issue from an operational perspective.
- Threat-induced effort escalation: Employees encouraged to work harder, faster, or longer, without clarity about what increased effort will actually produce—or whether it meaningfully addresses the crisis.
- Heightened organizational amygdala response: On both organizational and individual levels, experiencing distress over an extended period can increase the excitability of the amygdala—the part of the brain responsible for discerning threats—to the point that everything feels urgent or dangerous.
What’s the alternative to panic? It’s critical for leaders to ask: Are we responding from a place of fear and panic or from strategic discernment? Here are the strategies required for a resilient response:
- Proactive communication: In crisis, many organizations stop or significantly limit communication with employees. This is counterproductive. In the absence of clear information, employees are likely to construct their own narratives about what is happening, often far worse than reality. Regular, transparent communication, even when there is “nothing new to share,” helps to stabilize the crisis and temper widespread panic.
- Emotionally regulated leadership: Organizational crises are frequently exacerbated by leaders who lack the emotional intelligence skills of self-awareness (understanding how they are feeling) and self-management (choosing how to respond to those emotions). Emotionally dysregulated leaders can add fuel to an already volatile situation. Resilient leadership requires the ability to self-regulate or when that is not possible, to be surrounded by trusted others who can speak truth to power.
- Clarity of direction (over volume of effort): When a problem arises, a common fight-or-flight response is to throw more effort at it—more hours, activity, output—without pausing to assess whether that effort will actually resolve or meaningfully reduce the problem. Resilient organizations slow down to clarify direction and align effort with the outcome that will provide impact.
Recovery
The final, and most overlooked, component of resilient organizations is the recovery period.
Does this sound familiar? Your organization responds to a challenge, overcomes it, and immediately rolls into the next one. When the dust settles, the expectation is business as usual.
I work with many clients who recount that their organizations rarely pause to slow down, reflect, or recover. It’s go, go, go—all of the time.
There are two primary contributors to employee burnout. The most commonly understood is excessive workload, without adequate support. A lesser recognized contributor is the expectation that employees endure prolonged periods of organizational stress while continuing to produce as though nothing has happened. From a biological and neurological perspective, this is simply unsustainable.
When an organization moves through a crisis or major challenge, it is imperative to pause and recover—for the well-being of employees and the long-term sustainability of the organization.
Recovery is not a luxury; it is a necessary phase of resilience. Some ways organizations can support recovery include:
- Compensatory time-off: Actively offering and encouraging time off after periods of intensified effort—time that does not draw from limited vacation or sick leave banks.
- Leadership postmortems: Creating space to examine what happened, how the organization responded, and what was learned, without blame.
- Intentional stress reduction: Temporarily reducing demands to allow employees’ nervous systems to recover. What can be deprioritized? What can wait?
- Organizational retreats: Investing in connection, re-energizing, and realignment after sustained periods of strain.
If your organization is only investing in building employee resilience, without focusing on organizational resilience, it is asking people to carry what organizational systems should be designed to hold. Organizational resilience is not measured by endurance. It is reflected in the strength of the structures, decisions, and leadership behaviors that reduce how often crises arise—and how destabilizing they become when they do.
