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.”