Sickness-related absenteeism is reported to be in the billions. In 2022, employees were absent from work due to illness for more than nine days on average. The premiums for daily sickness benefits alone, with which companies insure the wages of their sick employees, would amount to 4.6 billion Swiss francs in 2021, as the “NZZ” recently wrote on Sunday. Stress, bullying, workplace disputes are responsible for workers becoming mentally ill, who are absent from work for an average of six to seven months.

Increasingly, companies are turning to external help and trying to counteract this fact through mentoring and coaching programmes. Resilient people have resources, stabilising personality traits, the ability to act proactively and the gift to reflect on their actions in order to draw new insights and integrate them into their future lives or everyday business life.

Resilience can be built, used and developed. An inner developed resilience coupled with flexibility and agility helps one to access a variety of response modes, which overlaps with the theme of self-efficacy. It is a situational balancing of a continuously existing tension between agility (necessary for the change of a system) and stability (necessary for the maintenance of a system). Agility is what makes resilience possible in the first place, because it gives the system the necessary elasticity and flexibility in the context of change processes. Stability maintains resilience by bringing the necessary resilience, structure and form to a system.

In such programmes, resilience can be experienced and learned as an awareness, action and “empowerment” competence. Resilient companies are aware of how important shared values are for the motivation of their employees. They promote the identification of their employees through consciously lived values and meaning-based communication. Furthermore, they build on a wide range of experience and on the mindfulness of their employees. They are thus better able to deal with unfamiliar situations and master new challenges and tasks.

Ultimately, it is the assumption of self-responsibility and employees can find self-determined and self-responsible solutions through the acquired and further developed self-management competence.

They help the company to shape the future and can sustainably anchor the common visions in the market, as they can incorporate knowledge about competences into their decisions, despite today’s ambiguous world.

The importance and benefits for businesses cannot be denied and the current challenge can be addressed by taking simple steps.