This is a bit of a tangent from our usual areas, but people should be sustainable too, and therefore it is interesting that new research from Zurich Insurance Group and Oxford Research and Development Partners have highlighted how resilient people are to change, and how this affects both individual and organisational performance.

The Global People Resilience Study 2026, based on responses from 11,175 working-age adults across 16 countries, found that personal resilience is strongly linked to workplace performance. Employees with the highest resilience report good or excellent performance at twice the rate of those with the lowest resilience.

As AI and other forces accelerate change in the workplace, personal resilience is emerging as a critical indicator of workforce performance. The report introduces Zurich’s Personal Resilience Index, a framework that measures resilience and the factors that shape it across five interconnected domains: psychological, physical, social, financial and digital. The framework helps organisations understand what drives resilience and identify practical ways to strengthen workforce preparedness and adaptability.

Resilience is also linked to how employees relate to their employer. Highly resilient employees are more than four times as likely to recommend their employer and report an employee Net Promoter Score 75 points higher than the least resilient group, suggesting that resilience is linked not only to individual output but also to engagement and advocacy.

Furthermore, the research shows that resilience is not a fixed personality trait. It is a capability that can be developed over time.

The study also finds that sleep is closely linked to resilience, with better sleepers reporting higher scores across every life domain, making recovery an important, but often overlooked, part of workforce readiness.

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