In October, leaders start urging their teams to “dig deep” for the final push to year-end. It sounds like the sort of thing a leader should do, right? Unfortunately not!
Resilience gets praised as the magic ingredient that will see people through pressure. But here’s the problem: resilience is not an endless resource. Rely on it too much, and you risk breaking the very people you depend on.
When Resilience Becomes a Burden
Resilience fatigue shows up when employees are repeatedly asked to bounce back from pressure without the system itself ever changing. Instead of addressing workload, design flaws, or poor management standards, companies double down on telling people to be tougher. It’s the equivalent of patching a leaky roof by handing out buckets instead of fixing the structure.
The science is clear: resilience is not just an individual trait. It’s heavily shaped by the environment people work in. Research published in the Annual Review of Psychology highlights that social support, fairness, and autonomy are stronger predictors of sustained resilience than personal grit alone. When these are absent, asking for more resilience simply accelerates burnout.
The Data Behind the Drag
Burnout is at record highs. Gallup’s global workplace report in 2024 found that 44% of employees experience daily stress, and more than half report feeling disengaged. Deloitte’s research puts the cost of workplace stress at billions annually through lost productivity, healthcare, and turnover.
Resilience programmes, when run in isolation, often miss the mark. A 2023 review in Occupational Medicine found that individual stress-management training produced short-term gains but little lasting effect unless paired with organisational change. The takeaway? You can’t yoga your way out of a strained system.
What Real Resilience Looks Like
True resilience at work is a collective property. It’s the ability of an organisation to withstand pressure without breaking its people. That means:
- Designing sustainable workloads rather than relying on heroics.
- Building trust and psychological safety so people can flag risks early.
- Embedding flexibility and autonomy so employees feel in control, not trapped.
- Making fairness non-negotiable — in pay, recognition, and opportunity.
Leaders who focus here see returns not just in wellbeing but also in performance. McKinsey research (2022) found that organisations with resilient cultures recover from disruption 1.5 times faster than peers.
A Practical Reset for Leaders
So how do you move from resilience fatigue to resilience by design? Start with three questions:
- Where are we demanding effort instead of removing barriers?
- Are we treating resilience as a skill for individuals or a signal about the system?
- What evidence do we actually have about the lived experience of our people?
This is where modern diagnostics become game-changing. By mapping psychosocial risks and cultural drag factors, leaders can see the hidden pressure points draining energy across the workforce. Traditional engagement surveys rarely reveal this. They track sentiment but not causation, offering surface-level impressions without showing what’s driving them.
That’s why Engagement Scores and Glassdoor reviews often tell two different stories. Employees may report being “engaged” in a survey, but when they feel unheard or unsafe, their anonymous reviews tell the truth. Without deeper diagnostics, leaders end up managing perception instead of addressing reality.
The Bottom Line
Building resilience isn’t achieved by teaching people to put up with more. It’s done by building workplaces that don’t ask them to. In a climate where fatigue, stress, and attrition are silently eroding business performance, resilience fatigue is the wake-up call.
If we want our teams to finish the year strong, we must stop demanding more grit and start redesigning the system. That’s where resilience really lives.
WellWise supports organisations in addressing resilience fatigue by moving the focus from individual coping to systemic design. Its diagnostic maps psychosocial risks and cultural barriers, helping leaders remove the drag that drains teams and create environments where resilience is reliably built into the system, not wishfully demanded from people.
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