Resilience, a new buzzword in Human Resources

I can’t explain why or how, the human resources “gurus” insist on rescuing words from other disciplines, which have nothing to do with ours, to explain phenomena that occurs in companies, and more so in their employees.

The latest buzzword is the term resilience, which according to Wikipedia is “in psychology is the positive capacity of people to cope with stress and catastrophe.” When a subject or an animal group is capable of overcoming distress of this kind, it is said that they have the right resilience and can resist negative events, or even emerge strengthened by them.

To understand how this new concept is used in human resources, Wikipedia can serve us as a reference, but it doesn’t clarify things well. After searching again and again in forums and dictionaries, I have begun to see some things a little more coherently…

We can say that resilience also means “the capacity to survive in spite of the problems or damage, but without involving or requiring effort of any kind. Another definition might be “the capacity to recover, recoup, over come the negative or harmful influences”.

After reading a plethora of varied definitions, I’m inclined to think that in the human resources world, the term resilience refers to “resistance to change”, or better said, the natural resistance that sets the oldest workforce against the new processes, partners, colleagues, systems, activities or tasks.

We can also twist this around and talk of resilience as the capacity of the workforce to adapt to these changes without any resistance. This is something that companies are beginning to carefully consider in these uncertain and difficult times.

It is not surprising that with so many mass layoffs, redundancies, workforce restructuring, etc., we hear of new buzzwords that talk of the change in organizations and how employees deal with it.

In a little while, we might read in job offers something like “people with a high degree of resilience required”  Not all together bad, so long as the candidates do not confuse it with the “capacity to change residence”…