2025 was a year of relentless pressure for teams in high-stakes roles. From trust and safety units grappling with harmful content, to financial service analysts navigating volatile markets, to cyber responders on 24/7 alert, the cumulative strain has been profound. Globally, workplace wellbeing remains under significant pressure: by late 2025, at least one in three workers in many countries was at high risk of poor mental health, with many reporting that their mental state was hurting their productivity. People are arriving to work carrying more emotional load than ever as lingering fatigue from years of uncertainty now colors every meeting, project, and decision. After such a tough year, it’s clear that resilience cannot be seen simply as an individual trait or a personal challenge. True resilience, especially in high-pressure environments, must start with wellbeing, built and supported systemically by our organizations.
The cumulative toll on high pressure teams
For employees on the frontlines of high-pressure sectors, the past year’s challenges didn’t let up. Content moderators and trust & safety teams faced a barrage of traumatic material and policy dilemmas daily. Healthcare and crisis support workers continued to confront staff shortages and ethical stressors. Cybersecurity and emergency response teams remained on perpetual high alert. The result has been not just individual burnout, but team-level exhaustion and strain. Studies show that across industries, only about 49% of employees report being in good overall health and free of burnout symptoms. In other words, over half of the workforce is either struggling with their health or showing signs of burnout. This toll is not confined to one field or region, it’s widespread, affecting those in roles defined by constant vigilance, high stakes, and emotional labor.
Signs of this accumulated strain are evident. Morale and productivity drop as teams disengage and output falls, while attrition and absences rise; under unrelenting pressure, even strong workplace cultures begin to erode. In 2025’s “always on” work climate, many workers saw their stress begin to spill over into sleep problems and impaired performance. Crucially, these issues rarely start with weak individuals, they start with weak systems. Factors like constant connectivity, unrealistic targets, and reward structures that equate long hours with loyalty create an environment primed for burnout. As one report put it, sustainable high performance isn’t about squeezing more out of people, it’s about designing an environment where their energy can be renewed. After a year of nonstop demands, leaders are recognizing that the status quo of pushing people harder is untenable. The focus now is shifting from making individuals “tough it out” to repairing the conditions around them that are causing fatigue.
Resilience isn’t just personal toughness
“Resilience” is often misunderstood as a personal capacity, a kind of toughness or grit that employees either have or lack. This misconception can lead to well-meaning but misguided solutions: telling people to be more positive, offering generic wellness apps, or celebrating those who silently bear more workload. In reality, resilience in high-pressure work is not a solo act and not an innate trait that one simply must cultivate. It is a collective and systemic property of a healthy workplace. Research underscores that the drivers of resilience and wellbeing are largely organizational. For example, a global study of 30,000 workers found that key “enablers” of employee health include factors like psychological safety and supportive teamwork which are conditions created by leadership and culture. Likewise, the World Health Organization’s guidelines on mental health at work emphasize organizational interventions that directly improve working conditions and environments as the most effective way to prevent stress and burnout. In short, the context matters profoundly.
Indeed, leading experts now talk about embedding resilience as an organizational muscle rather than an individual trait. This means companies must treat resilience the way they treat any critical capability, by building it into their processes, norms, and training. That might involve teaching managers how to recognize overload on their teams and adjust workloads, fostering open communication about challenges, and redesigning roles to reduce chronic stressors. It also means acknowledging that if employees are burning out or disengaging, it’s often a sign that something in the system is broken. As the McKinsey Health Institute notes, interventions that target teams and workplace systems tend to improve employee health more than those aimed only at individuals. Unfortunately, many managers still lack the support or skills to manage people in a way that bolsters resilience with only about 20% of surveyed managers strongly feeling their organization helps them be successful “people managers”. Bridging this gap is essential. Frontline managers and team leads are the conduit through which organizational values (like prioritizing wellbeing) either become real or ring hollow. Without equipping and incentivizing managers to support their teams’ health, calls for individual resilience fall flat.
Ultimately, resilience is a team sport. It flourishes when there is trust, flexibility, and a safety net, when employees know that if they speak up about stress, they’ll be heard; if they stumble, they’ll be supported; and if they need a break, the culture will not punish them for taking it. No one person, however “tough,” can compensate for a toxic or unsupportive workplace. As one analysis framed it, burnout and even moral injury are not just personal failings or challenges, they are indicators of systemic strain, requiring structural solutions. Rebuilding resilience, therefore, starts with fixing the system around people, not fixing the people.
The invisible injuries: fatigue, moral injury and burnout
After the past year, many workers are suffering from what we might call invisible injuries, psychological strains that accumulate over time. Chronic fatigue is one such injury. In high-pressure roles, prolonged stress keeps staff in fight-or-flight mode for too long, gradually shrinking their mental “window of tolerance” where they can think clearly and perform optimally. Decision-making falters when people are mentally exhausted; creativity and focus give way to just getting through the day. Some employees withdraw emotionally as a coping mechanism, showing signs of disengagement or cynicism. This isn’t “laziness”, it’s a symptom of overload. Years of crisis management and high alert have left a kind of psychological weariness in many teams.
Another form of invisible injury is moral injury. Originally a term from military psychology, moral injury describes the distress that professionals feel when they are forced to act against their ethical values. In healthcare, for instance, clinicians may experience moral injury if they have to ration care or enforce policies that conflict with their sense of right and wrong. Similarly, a trust & safety analyst might feel moral injury when compelled to leave harmful content online due to ambiguous rules, or a financial employee when pressured to meet targets at odds with clients’ best interests. Over time, these moral stresses can manifest as guilt, shame, or a loss of meaning in one’s work. Recent studies have found moral injury strongly correlates with outcomes like PTSD, depression, and turnover among frontline workers. In 2025, even beyond the acute pandemic phase, moral distress remains a pervasive hazard in caregiving and public safety roles, one that standard wellness tips won’t touch.
And of course, there is burnout, the syndrome of chronic workplace stress that hasn’t been successfully managed, marked by exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced efficacy. Burnout rates spiked during the pandemic (nearly one in two healthcare workers reported significant burnout symptoms at its peak) and have stayed alarmingly high in its aftermath. In many organizations, we now see burnout not as an isolated case here or there, but as a team-level phenomenon with whole groups struggling under unrealistic workloads or moral stress. This collective burnout can lead to vicious cycles: as more people disengage or leave, the pressure increases on those who remain. It’s a recipe for cascading failure if unaddressed. Crucially, burnout is not a personal weakness. The WHO now classifies burnout as a work-related phenomenon, and attributes it largely to chronic workplace stressors that haven’t been successfully managed by the organization (not the individual). The presence of widespread fatigue, moral injury, and burnout is a flashing warning sign that something is fundamentally wrong in the work environment. These are injuries that require healing on a systemic level, better policies, adequate staffing, realistic goals, and an organizational willingness to change how work gets done.
Recovery and performance require systemic support
If there is one lesson for leaders after 2025, it is that recovery and sustained high performance go hand in hand. You cannot expect people to deliver quality work year after year in extreme conditions without deliberate periods and systems for recovery. Organizations that thrive build systems for rest and recovery as deliberately as they build systems for results. This means making downtime, reflection, and support an integrated part of operations, not occasional perks or afterthoughts. For example, some forward-thinking teams now implement “recovery cycles”: planned slower periods or rotation of duties after intense projects or crises, giving team members a chance to decompress without guilt. Leaders also play a key role in setting boundary hygiene like modeling that it’s okay to disconnect. Simple steps like discouraging late-night emails, encouraging actual vacations, and praising efficient work (not just long hours) help create a culture where rest is respected. In performance evaluations, redefining success to focus on outcomes and quality rather than hours logged or sheer output can alleviate the pressure that leads to burnout. And when teams collectively normalize healthy practices, for instance, everyone agreeing that it’s fine not to reply to messages on a weekend, it creates shared accountability for wellbeing.
What all these measures have in common is that they are structural, visible, and modeled from the top. A company can offer meditation apps or mental health days, but if the underlying culture rewards overwork or if leaders never unplug themselves, employees receive a mixed message. By contrast, when executives openly prioritize wellbeing (e.g. regularly talking about it, setting policies that protect it, and following those policies themselves), it legitimizes everyone in the organization to do the same. The payoffs from such systemic change are tangible. Deloitte research finds that for every £1 invested in workplace mental health initiatives, employers get an estimated £4.70 back through improved productivity, lower absenteeism, and higher retention. A healthier workforce is simply a more resilient and productive workforce. Conversely, a lack of effective support at work actively undermines performance, it saps people’s ability to do their jobs well and leads to more absences. In high-pressure sectors where precision and engagement are non-negotiable, investing in embedded wellbeing support is not a luxury; it’s a strategic imperative.
Lightly drawing on our experience at Zevo, we have seen the benefits of taking a systemic perspective on resilience. For instance, our SAFER™ system approaches resilience not as an individual checkbox, but as an organizational system that is preventative, proactive, and embedded. Instead of one-size-fits-all wellness programs that sit outside daily work, we co-design interventions with teams and embed support into daily operations, not as a bolt-on. This means support mechanisms are in the flow of work, easy to access in the moment, and normalized so that seeking help or pausing for a break carries no stigma. A systemic model like SAFER spans every level: we work with leadership on policy and culture, equip managers with tools to handle pressure and coach their people, and give frontline employees resources to sustain focus and recover without fear of judgment. The goal is to share the burden of resilience across the organization, rather than placing it all on individuals’ shoulders. Early data show that such holistic approaches can improve psychological wellbeing and measured resilience while reducing indicators of overload and stress. In short, when care is embedded and systemic, teams remain more consistent, focused, and equipped under pressure, exactly the outcomes high-pressure industries seek.
Conclusion: Wellbeing as the foundation of resilience
After a demanding year, it’s tempting for organizations to push their people to “bounce back” quickly. But true resilience is not about bouncing back on an empty tank. It’s about ensuring the tank is being refilled continuously through a work environment that cares for its people. That means making wellbeing the foundation of how we work, not a separate agenda item. Leaders in trust & safety, finance, cyber, healthcare, and other high-intensity fields have a responsibility in 2026 and beyond to rebuild their teams’ resilience the right way, by creating a climate where psychological health is protected as diligently as performance metrics are pursued. The organizations that do this will not only see healthier, more engaged employees; they will cultivate the kind of adaptive, mission-driven, and loyal teams that can weather future crises. Resilience, at its heart, is a shared strength. And when wellbeing is woven into the fabric of the workplace, resilience becomes second nature, a quality of the entire system, empowering every individual within it to thrive even after the toughest of years.
