Why Fixing Burnout Isn’t About Resilience Training

By Mariam Krikorian Atkinson, PhD

Burnout has become one of the defining challenges in health care. In response, many organizations have invested in resilience training— initiatives like mindfulness sessions, wellness workshops, and stress management programs. These efforts are well intentioned, and they may help people cope. But they’re not solving the problem.

Here’s why: burnout isn’t an individual failure.

The World Health Organization describes burnout as the result of chronic workplace stress that hasn’t been successfully managed. With that definition in mind, burnout isn’t about a lack of grit, poor coping skills, or not enough resilience. It’s the predictable outcome of systems that place chronic demands on people without adequately supporting them.

In health care, burnout is driven by a lot of factors: workload and staffing constraints, inefficient systems and workflows, poor teamwork and communication, lack of control and autonomy, and misalignment between values and organizational priorities, to name a few. An important piece of this is that burnout affects not just individuals but team functioning, patient care and organizational performance (Bruria, Maya, Gadi et al 2022).

The Problem with Resilience Training

Resilience matters. People with higher resilience often cope better with adversity.

But resilience changes how people respond to stress. It doesn’t eliminate the conditions creating the stress in the first place.

When organizations rely primarily on resilience training to address burnout, they’re treating symptoms rather than causes. The unintended message becomes: if you’re struggling, you need to become more resilient, while the underlying problems remain untouched.

What Actually Reduces Burnout

Research shows that organizational interventions are critical, not optional. These include:

Fixing workflows. Reduce unnecessary administrative burden. Improve EHR usability. Streamline processes. Basically, get simple day-to-day functions in order.

Improving teamwork. One of my favorite interventions because strong teams become a competitive advantage that benefits clinicians, patients, and organizations alike. Better teamwork is associated with greater job satisfaction, lower burnout, and better patient outcomes (Miller, Kim, Silverman et al 2018).

Increasing control and voice. People are more engaged when they have meaningful influence over decisions that affect their work.

Strengthening organizational support. Resilience isn’t just an individual trait. High-performing organizations provide necessary resources, support adaptation, and enable teams to perform under pressure (Ignatowicz, Tarrant, Mannion et al 2023).

My own research reinforces this evidence base. In a 2024 study of nearly 400 healthcare workers across 9 hospitals during COVID-19 (Atkinson, Biddinger, Chughtai et al 2024), my colleagues and I found that informal ways of working— real-time problem solving, strong relationships, and ad hoc collaboration— were the strongest drivers of resilience. Formal structures and protocols, meanwhile, were essential for maintaining performance.

The findings were clear. Resilience didn’t emerge because individuals simply “toughed it out.” It emerged because organizations created environments where teams could adapt together.

A Better Way to Think About Resilience

Resilience shouldn’t be the solution to burnout. It should be the buffer that helps people navigate the unavoidable challenges of healthcare within a well-designed system.

We can’t ask clinicians to become more resilient in broken systems. But we can build systems that require less resilience in the first place.

Resilience training is appealing because it’s fairly inexpensive, easy to implement, and most of all, doesn’t require changing how work gets done. But meaningful reductions in burnout require something much harder: redesigning work, improving operations, investing in teams, and rethinking how care is delivered.

Bottom Line

Burnout is not a people problem. It’s a design problem.

We can’t train our way out of a systems problem. If the work remains unnecessarily difficult, communication remains fragmented, staffing remains inadequate, and clinicians have little control over how they deliver care, no amount of mindfulness or resilience training will eliminate burnout.

The organizations making meaningful progress aren’t asking, “How do we help people tolerate this better?” They’re asking, “Why have we designed work that requires so much tolerance in the first place?”

That’s where meaningful change begins. The most effective burnout strategy isn’t asking people to be stronger; it’s creating workplaces that better support the people we already have. If this resonates, I’d welcome the opportunity to connect and talk about what this could mean for your organization.

References

Atkinson, Mariam Krikorian, Paul D. Biddinger, Mah-Afroze Chughtai, Tuna C. Hayirli, John L. Hick, Nicholas V. Cagliuso Sr, and Sara J. Singer. “Assessing health care leadership and management for resilience and performance during crisis: The HERO-36.” Health care management review 49, no. 1 (2024): 14-22.

Bruria, Adini, Siman-Tov Maya, Sadovsky Gadi, and Tal Orna. “Impact of emergency situations on resilience at work and burnout of Hospital’s healthcare personnel.” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 76 (2022): 102994.

Ignatowicz, Agnieszka, Carolyn Tarrant, Russell Mannion, Dena El-Sawy, Simon Conroy, and Daniel Lasserson. “Organizational resilience in healthcare: a review and descriptive narrative synthesis of approaches to resilience measurement and assessment in empirical studies.” BMC Health Services Research 23, no. 1 (2023): 376.

Miller, Christopher J., Bo Kim, Allie Silverman, and Mark S. Bauer. “A systematic review of team-building interventions in non-acute healthcare settings.” BMC health services research 18, no. 1 (2018): 146.