Corporate Wellness Can't Build Resilience. Job Design Can.

Picture this: Oxford, 2023. A researcher named William Fleming stops asking whether the mindfulness pilot at one company worked and instead pulls together data on tens of thousands of workers across hundreds of organisations.

He looks into mindfulness sessions, resilience workshops, and apps with breathing exercises in survey data covering 46,336 workers. His findings? Participants making use of these company-provided initiatives appeared no better off than everyone else.

Meanwhile, in the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs survey, 67% of employers named resilience, flexibility and agility as a core #skill their workforce needs right now, second only to analytical thinking.

How is corporate wellness connected to resilience?

Resilience sits with self-efficacy and optimism as a personal resource in the JD-R model. Personal resources buffer the effect of #job demands on strain. That classification is exactly what makes resilience commercially attractive: if you can raise personal resources, you can in theory hold demands constant and still reduce strain. Corporate wellness is a personal resource intervention.

The same report expects around 39% of workers' core skills to change by 2030 as AI and other pressures reshape the #work itself. More people will spend more of their careers in unfamiliar territory, so the demand for resilience as a counter-weight to change makes sense.

If resilience is so important, why don't these interventions work?

Fleming's research points at the organisation. The levers he found more promising were structural: scheduling, staffing levels, management practices, performance review, job design. Not subscriptions to guided breathing apps.

Can resilience be developed as a skill on an individual level, outside of work?

Absolutely and, in fact, it should. Coaching is a great way to do it but, of course I would say that ;) But, recovery matters too. Sleep, real detachment after hours, focusing on relationships, community, hobbies, interests. All the other stuff that make life meaningful and usually don't come with a paycheck.

⁉️ Question for you: Is building resilience the responsibility of the employer or the individual? And what has actually worked for you in developing it as a skill?

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🌟Sparking Leadership # 55: a weekly series on human-centered sustainable #leadership. Reach out if you're stuck in your #career and need a change or follow for more sparkling content. In the meantime, lead with spark! ✨️