In the face of workforce challenges, agility and resilience may be key to maintaining employee well-being and thriving through adversity.
By Simon Kent
The world may be chaotic and unpredictable, but that’s no reason for businesses and individuals not to thrive. Indeed, in the face of immense challenge, it can be possible for companies to push forward and achieve more rather than simply weathering the storm. In 2012, Nassim Nicholas Taleb published his book “Antifragile,” which proposed an approach which did just that. The idea has been used in risk analysis, physics, and even transportation planning, and it offers HR the tools and mindset that can enable it to perform, deliver, and thrive in the face of adversity. Indeed, while being effective on a personal level, spread across the workforce, the techniques could take a business to greater success even at a time of challenge and stress. “We need to gain clarity, resilience, and a growth mindset in a context of plenty of confusion, risks, and fake news,” says David Reyero, people business partner at healthcare company Sanofi Iberia. “Antifragility can help find the right approach to these important challenges.”
This is not your usual toolkit of skills and behaviours. Reyero says a key part of being antifragile is to develop and maintain a meaningful personal and professional life giving the individual a purposeful path to follow. With this in place, other techniques can be introduced: stress management, the ability to manage uncertainty, the cultivation of emotional intelligence, and so on. Being antifragile means addressing the physical, mental, spiritual, and relationship sides of life, ensuring there is always a good support network to help individuals through the bad times with advice and emotional support.
“The concept certainly appeals,” agrees Marcus Uzabalis, director of HR and payroll consultancy LACE Partners, “after all, who wouldn’t want to be able to harness a high level of entropy, or lack of predictability, and use it to become stronger and more tenacious?” Uzabalis says being antifragile means companies can gain the ability to pivot quickly as the external environment or business opportunities change, enabling employees to adapt and respond quickly. “Employees who have an antifragile mindset demonstrate many of the same qualities that typify agile ways of working,” he says, “being daring, failing fast and pivoting, and seeing mistakes as positive and a way to test and improve hypotheses.”
But Uzabalis issues a warning for organisations not to simply step into the antifragile arena without considering what is happening within the business more generally. “There is a distinction between encouraging or promoting an antifragile mindset to thrive within a healthy, evolving organisation versus having to weather the stress and adversity from working within a toxic organisational culture,” he says.
Making this judgement call can be helped by listening to employees—using sentiment analysis, employee opinion surveys, and more to understand if employees are truly lacking the mindset they need to deal with stress and uncertainty. This feedback can help HR understand why employees are feeling stressed in the first place. If the main driver is company culture rather than external influences, it is better to address the underlying issue in the workplace rather than just telling employees they need to cope.
“Employees who have an antifragile mindset demonstrate many of the same qualities that typify agile ways of working: being daring, failing fast and pivoting, and seeing mistakes as positive and a way to test and improve hypotheses.” – Marcus Uzabalis, LACE Partners
Alice Burks, director of people success at payroll platform Deel sees the antifragile approach particularly beneficial at manager level. “A confident, capable manager community ensures that, whatever adversity might arrive, teams are well-supported to continue delivering what’s needed while staying motivated,” she says.
Deel has a set of leadership standards, including the pillar “Adapt to Win” which asks leaders to embrace adversity as a catalyst for growth. The business is currently in hyper-growth, operating in more than 100 countries, so change is a constant. “It’s important our managers continue to look for opportunities within setbacks or strategy-shifts,” notes Burks.
Learning and development initiatives support this through formal manager development programs and company-wide sessions which help people scale their skills and connect with their teams and leaders. Appropriate behaviours are recognised and rewarded, engendering a sense of community that also works against the downsides of adversarial environments.
Reyero also reports his business is upskilling and supporting employees towards antifragile ideas. The overall objective, he says, is to improve resilience and instill a positive mindset within employees, helping them to gain perspective on bad days and cope with instances that cause high stress levels. Part of this is the company’s “All Well” programme, a holistic well-being approach to supporting healthy minds, bodies, financials, and working environment. The impact of this is monitored through employee surveys and workshops.
However, the monitoring is also more precise and personal. “In our annual performance review, we deep dive not only on the ‘what’—objectives—and ‘how’—skills and behaviours—but also on the well-being,” says Reyero. “We use key questions like ‘how are you to build meaningful conversations and act on employee’s feedback’? For this purpose, we promote in advance a psychologically safe environment.”
Perhaps the most challenging part of assuming an antifragile approach is that often the way forward seems to contradict traditional business practices. Sarah Evans, director of workplace consultancy at business consultancy Discovery ADR, highlights the idea of supporting employees to be brave about trying out new ideas and concepts, almost with the expectation of failure. She highlights the “fail-fast forward” concept from Autodesk’s CEO Carol Bartz, describing an environment where a company can fail, be resilient to that failure, and quickly overcome the upending obstacles.
“Companies need to incorporate the culture and language that celebrates employees who look for alternative approaches and can bounce back,” she says, adding that experiential training can be particularly good for encouraging this behaviour.
Rather than assuming the only way to efficiency is that more should be done with less, antifragile thinking pushes companies to grow within their current capacity.
Evans also warns organisations not to cut capacity to drive efficiency. Rather than assuming the only way to efficiency is that more should be done with less, antifragile thinking pushes companies to grow within their current capacity. This paradigm shift, particularly difficult to sell at times of economic challenge, makes expansion the key to thriving in difficult times rather than assuming the only way forward is to cut back.
Evans places emphasis on data to underpin the actions of individuals and the business. Indeed, by releasing data around the organisation she says decision-making can be promoted at all levels of a business, further creating a forward moving robust business. “Empower your people so that decision-making is not the preserve of the leaders,” she stresses. “Put the authority where the information is.”
The antifragile approach can certainly offer ways forward for businesses whatever their circumstances, but it isn’t something to be taken on lightly. Enabling people to take advantage of adversity requires a risk-taking attitude from employees, and that in turn must be supported by the actions and resources of HR.
