What would you think if, after months of carrying an unreasonable workload, your organisation invited you to attend a workshop on resilience?
Perhaps the intention is good.
The organisation knows the work is demanding. It wants to support employees. Someone designs a thoughtful programme on managing stress, setting boundaries and staying motivated.
But from the employee’s side of the room, the message may sound very different:
The work is not going to change. You need to become better at coping with it.
This is the risk when we begin with a programme before understanding the system in which people are working.
What the organisation may not see
Imagine a community worker reaching the end of an already difficult day.
An urgent request arrives late in the afternoon. The person seeking help does not fit neatly into the existing process. Two internal systems hold different pieces of information. Another agency needs to be contacted, but the person who can approve the next step is unavailable.
The community worker stays late.
They use personal relationships to find a way through. They complete the formal documentation afterwards. The person receives help, and the case is eventually closed.
From the organisation’s perspective, the system appears to have worked.
What remains invisible is everything the worker had to do to make it work.
The emotional reassurance. The informal phone calls. The workarounds. The judgement required when the policy did not match the situation. The additional time that was never recorded.
When employees repeatedly compensate for gaps in the system, their resourcefulness can hide the very conditions exhausting them.
The more capable and committed they are, the easier it becomes for the organisation to rely on them to absorb what is not working.
The people closest to the work often see the system most clearly
Frontline and community staff work where organisational decisions meet human reality.
They know which policies make sense on paper but become difficult in practice. They know where information gets lost, which approval creates unnecessary delay and which process only works because someone quietly intervenes.
Yet when organisations design development programmes for them, these employees are often treated primarily as participants.
Someone else decides what they need. Someone else chooses the learning outcomes. Someone else defines what success should look like.
By the time they enter the room, the programme has already been built.
We may ask whether they found it engaging. We rarely ask whether we have correctly understood the problem.
Is it really a capability gap?
When people appear overwhelmed, disengaged or inconsistent, it is tempting to conclude that they need greater resilience, better communication or stronger time-management skills.
Sometimes they do.
But the same behaviour can also emerge when roles are unclear, workloads are unrealistic, decisions are made too far from the work or employees are carrying responsibilities without the authority to act.
A workshop may help someone manage their time more effectively. It cannot create additional hours in an understaffed team.
Training can teach people to have difficult conversations. It cannot make speaking honestly safe when the organisation has repeatedly punished disagreement.
A resilience programme may give employees useful tools. It cannot resolve a system that depends on them continually doing more with less.
An organisational psychology lens helps us understand the effects of workload, autonomy, trust, emotional demands and psychological safety.
Systems thinking asks us to look at how policies, structures, relationships and decisions combine to create the conditions people are experiencing.
Together, they invite a more careful question:
Are we looking at a capability gap, or at people responding to the system around them?
Listen before designing
Before deciding what programme people need, spend time understanding their working reality.
Not only through a survey with predefined choices. Not only through a conversation with their managers.
Speak with the people doing the work.
Ask them to describe a difficult day.
Ask what takes more effort than it should. What they repeatedly have to work around. What responsibilities they carry that never appear in their job descriptions. What leaders may not see from where they sit.
Most importantly, ask:
What is the desired outcome, and what conditions would help people contribute towards it?
The answer may still lead to a programme. Employees may genuinely benefit from new skills, reflective space or opportunities to learn from one another.
But the programme will begin from an understanding of their reality rather than an assumption about what is missing in them.
It may also reveal that training is only one part of the response.
The organisation may need to simplify a process, clarify a role, improve supervision, redistribute work or bring frontline insight into decisions made elsewhere.
Do not confuse commitment with endless capacity
There is a tendency to describe frontline and community workers as heroes.
The appreciation may be sincere. But praise can become uncomfortable when it replaces practical support.
Calling people dedicated does not make an unreasonable workload sustainable. Celebrating their resilience does not remove the need to examine why so much resilience is continually required.
People can care deeply about their work and still be tired.
They can be committed to the communities they serve and still question the conditions under which they are expected to serve them.
They can value a development programme and still need the organisation to address what the programme cannot fix.
Honouring their contribution means more than recognising how much they carry.
It means becoming willing to ask why they have to carry so much in the first place.
Design with people, not only for them
The people closest to a problem should not be the last people consulted about its solution.
Invite them into the design process early enough for their insight to influence what is created. Let them help define the outcome, not merely comment on the delivery.
They may tell you that they do not need another motivational session. They need clearer decisions from their managers.
They may want training, but on a completely different issue from the one leadership identified.
Or they may need a space where they can make sense of the emotional weight of their work with others who genuinely understand it.
The purpose of listening is not to give employees everything they request. It is to make better decisions with a fuller understanding of the system.
When people feel that their experience has been taken seriously, the programme also begins from a different place.
It no longer says:
“Here is what we believe you lack.”
It says:
“Let us understand what the work requires and what will genuinely help.”
That is a very different invitation.
And it may be the first step towards changing not only the people doing the work, but the conditions in which they are being asked to do it.
If your organisation is considering a programme for frontline or community staff, we would welcome a conversation to understand their working context, clarify the desired outcome and explore what support would create meaningful value.