workplace resilience Archives - The Resilience Institute

The Hard Part of AI Isn’t the AI: Inside Our Fit for Change Report

HR and L&D leaders at our 16 October roundtable said AI adoption stalls on leadership direction and trust far more often than on tools.
Our new Fit for Change, Across Differences report captures the panel debate between Salesforce, Dassault Systèmes, Aperian and The Resilience Institute, including the question that split them: will AI cost jobs?
It also answers twelve questions from the room that we ran out of time for on the day.
Six quick wins close the report, and none of them needs a budget cycle to start.

The hard part of human-centred AI transformation isn’t the technology. It’s leadership direction, trust, and the capacity of the people asked to carry the change. That was the clearest message from the HR, L&D and inclusion leaders who joined The Resilience Institute and Aperian at AmCham Singapore on 16 October 2026.

We’ve pulled the afternoon together into a new report, Fit for Change, Across Differences: Insights Report. Here’s a look at what’s inside and why it’s worth your time. If you’d like the context we set before the day, our pre-event piece on what senior HR leaders in Singapore are asking about AI covers the questions we brought into the room.

Why does AI transformation feel so heavy for HR and L&D leaders?

For many HR and L&D leaders, AI transformation feels heavy because they’re leading a change they’re still going through themselves. One participant described HR as “having to change ourselves while managing change for the business.” A lot of people in the room recognised themselves in that.

When we asked about talent challenges, hardly anyone talked about tools. They talked about mixed signals from the top. Not enough time to practise. Teams pulling in two directions, with some people wanting AI in everything and others holding back.

An L&D manager said being “sandwiched” between senior leadership and the change programme made it hard to see what came next in their own role. If that sounds familiar, the report’s section on shared challenges is a good place to start. It ends with a question worth taking into your next team meeting.

Why do two people respond so differently to the same change?

Two people can go through the same restructuring and come out in very different places. In his keynote, Manish Arneja, Managing Partner SEA at The Resilience Institute, said the difference is agency: believing you still have a choice in how you think, feel and act, whatever is happening around you.

He then went a layer deeper, to the thing agency rests on, and to why you can’t build it on your own.

Mui Hwa Ng, Director of Consulting APAC at Aperian, added a distinction most change plans skip. Change and transition are different things. They don’t move at the same speed, and leaders need to support both.

The report sets out both ideas in full, along with a simple model for the two capacities AI is stretching at the same time.

Will AI cost jobs? Where did the panel disagree?

The panel didn’t agree on whether AI will cost jobs, and we kept that disagreement in the report rather than smoothing it over.

At one end, Gary Lee of Dassault Systèmes shared what his CHRO told the whole organisation about job losses. Allan Yeoh of Salesforce thinks much of the fear comes from hype. Manish was less sure, and expects a ripple effect across industries once one leader resets its cost structure.

Mui Hwa’s answer moved the conversation on. She wasn’t asking whether the fear is justified. She was asking what it costs an organisation to leave it unaddressed. Her closing line on this is one of the most quoted in the report.

Which human skills did HR leaders keep coming back to?

Checking and judgement came up more than anything else. Gary described a gap his organisation found after going “AI native”: people passing AI output up the line without verifying it, and managers catching the errors. It’s the same skill we unpacked in our piece on metacognition and knowing when to trust the AI or yourself.

Manish raised a quieter risk he had noticed in himself. What happens to our empathy after years of working with an AI that always agrees with us?

The report lists the human skills the room kept returning to, with where each one came up on the day. One participant’s organisation now treats human-AI collaboration as a skill in its own right.

What does human-centred AI transformation look like in practice?

In practice, human-centred AI transformation means treating AI as a leadership and culture change, with people at the centre of the plan. The panel brought examples from inside their own organisations:

Salesforce’s 4R model, which starts with existing people rather than headcount
Dassault Systèmes’ yearly review of every role, and why Gary believes “it’s always the mid layer that gets things moving”
Five plain questions Mui Hwa suggests asking across the whole organisation, not just in the boardroom

At the think tank tables, one participant shared how many protected learning days their organisation gives each person a year, with no deliverables attached. The number made the room stop.

Before you open the report, a few questions to sit with:

Where is your team split on AI, and is anyone talking about it out loud?
Who in your organisation is carrying the change without anyone carrying them?
When AI saves your team an hour, where does that hour actually go?

What can you do differently starting this week?

The report closes with six quick wins, three from each host, built from what the room asked for.

quick wins in the report. None of them needs a budget cycle to start.

Two to give you a feel for them. Measure resilience before you build a programme, so you have a baseline to work from. Our Resilience Assessment is one way to get it. And agree team norms for AI use, including one question most teams never ask: is AI surfacing what we’re missing, or confirming what we already think?

The other four, plus a set of principles for human-centred AI transformation, are in the full report.

Structures will change. Tools will arrive faster than our policies. What we can work on is who shows up to it.

From the Fit for Change, Across Differences keynote

How do I get the full Fit for Change report?

What we’ve shared here is a small part of the conversation. The full report has the panel’s own words, their answers to the questions we ran out of time for, and practical steps you can use with your teams.

Get the full report

If it helps you think about your own team, please pass it on to someone asking the same questions. And if it starts a conversation you’d like to have with us, we’d love to hear from you.

Global Engagement Hit a New Low in 2026: What Gallup’s Data Means for Resilience

Global engagement was 23% in Gallup’s 2024 report. It’s now 20%, the lowest level since 2020, and the second straight year of decline, with no region worldwide bucking the trend.
The sharpest new finding: manager engagement specifically has collapsed from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, wiping out what Gallup calls managers’ historical “engagement premium” over the people they lead.
Disengagement now costs the global economy an estimated $10 trillion a year, roughly 9% of global GDP, and best-practice organisations still achieve 79% manager engagement, nearly four times the global average, proof this is genuinely fixable, not inevitable.

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report has become one of the most closely watched annual snapshots of how work is actually going for people, and the trend line across its last three editions tells a genuinely sobering story. In 2024, global engagement stood at 23%. The 2026 report, published in April 2026 and covering 2025 data, puts it at 20%, the lowest level Gallup has recorded since 2020, and the second consecutive year of decline. Every region measured saw engagement fall or stay flat. None improved.

Resilience Institute offers a holistic approach to exactly the pattern this data describes, sustainable human performance and wellbeing, not a quick fix. This piece looks at what’s actually changed between the 2024 and 2026 reports, and what the sharpest new finding means for how resilience training should actually be applied.

Then and Now: What Actually Changed

The headline numbers moved in a consistent, worsening direction across every recent edition of the report. Global engagement: 23% (2024 report) → 21% (2025 report) → 20% (2026 report), a genuine, sustained decline rather than a single bad year. Daily stress has stayed stubbornly high across the same period, 41% in the 2024 and 2025 reports, 40% in the 2026 report, essentially flat and still well above pre-pandemic levels. One figure did move in the right direction: global wellbeing (Gallup’s “thriving” measure) rose slightly to 34% in the 2026 report, its first improvement in three years, though still meaning fewer than one in three people worldwide report genuinely thriving in their lives overall.

The economic cost has grown alongside the decline. The 2026 report puts the cost of low engagement at roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity, around 9% of global GDP, a meaningfully larger figure than what earlier reports cited.

The Real Story: Managers Are the Ones Disengaging Now

Here’s what the 2024 report couldn’t yet show, and what makes the 2026 report genuinely different rather than just a worse version of the same story: manager engagement specifically has collapsed. It’s fallen from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, a 9-point drop, with the steepest single-year fall, from 27% to 22%, landing between 2024 and 2025 alone. Individual contributor engagement, by contrast, has stayed relatively flat across the same period. Managers used to hold a real “engagement premium” over the people they led. Gallup’s own language is direct: that premium has essentially vanished, and managers are now barely more engaged than their own teams.

This matters enormously given a separate, consistent Gallup finding: managers account for up to 70% of the variance in team-level engagement. When the people responsible for driving engagement are themselves disengaging fastest, the effect ripples downward directly. Gallup’s own framing for 2026 is blunt: the manager crisis is now the workforce crisis, not a side issue sitting next to it.

There’s a genuinely hopeful data point buried in the same report worth holding onto: best-practice organisations still achieve 79% manager engagement, nearly four times the global average. This isn’t an inevitable, structural decline. It’s a solvable problem that most organisations simply haven’t solved yet.

Beyond Surface-Level Solutions

Plenty of organisations have addressed stress with surface-level fixes, wellness apps, generic stress management sessions, and these tend to fail at creating meaningful, lasting change. A more holistic approach, one incorporating emotional regulation, physical vitality, and mental clarity together, goes beyond basic wellness toward genuinely sustainable behavioural shift.

Real resilience requires a systems-level view: the interplay between work, life, and individual capacity, not any one lever in isolation. That’s what makes an intervention resonate with what employees actually need, rather than another well-intentioned programme that doesn’t move the underlying numbers.

Measuring What Engagement Surveys Miss

Gallup’s engagement data reveals the scale of the problem clearly. What it doesn’t reveal is the individual mechanics underneath it. Resilience Institute’s Resilience Assessment offers a deeper, more granular view, measuring specific factors like emotional stability, focus, and vitality that often stay hidden inside a traditional engagement survey. This data-driven layer lets organisations target interventions precisely: highlighting, for instance, that a specific team is struggling with sustained energy rather than motivation broadly, information a standard engagement score alone won’t surface.

Addressing Loneliness Directly

Loneliness remains a genuine, persistent thread across every recent edition of Gallup’s report, particularly among remote and younger workers, and it’s directly linked to declining mental health, disengagement, and lower productivity. Human connection is a genuine cornerstone of resilience, and programmes built to strengthen social bonds within teams, guided reflection, small group discussion, structured check-ins, even in virtual settings, measurably help counter the isolation the data keeps flagging year after year.

What This Means for Building Resilient Leadership

Invest in Managers Specifically, Not Just Employees Broadly

Given managers are now the fastest-disengaging group in the entire dataset, resilience investment aimed only at individual contributors misses the actual point of leverage. Managers need real support for their own resilience before they can genuinely model or sustain it for a team.

Build Regular Feedback and Clear Expectations

Practices like consistent feedback, clearly set expectations, and genuinely modelled emotional intelligence help managers create an environment that naturally reduces stress rather than compounding it.

Prioritise Organisation-Level Change, Not Just Individual Coping

Gallup’s own findings consistently favour organisation-level initiatives, changes in management practice, better resource allocation, over individual stress-management interventions alone. Resilient leaders create the conditions; individual coping skills matter more once those conditions are actually in place.

Moving From Surviving to Thriving

Gallup’s data consistently shows engaged employees are more likely to thrive across their whole life, not just at work, and building genuine resilience means helping people move past survival mode, where stress and overwhelm dominate, toward a state where they can find real meaning, purpose, and satisfaction in their role. A thriving workforce isn’t just more pleasant to manage. It’s measurably more productive, innovative, and adaptive, genuine advantages as organisations navigate a working environment that shows no sign of settling down.

The data didn’t just get worse between 2024 and 2026. It got more specific. The manager crisis is the workforce crisis, and that’s exactly where resilience investment needs to go first.

What Early 2026 Is Revealing About the Pressure Women Leaders Face

As International Women’s Day approaches, several developments this first quarter of the year point to a reality many organisations are only beginning to recognise.

The pressures women leaders face today are becoming more complex and more visible.

In Singapore, the government recently introduced subsidies for genetic testing that identifies hereditary breast and ovarian cancer risks. The move reflects a growing understanding that women often delay health screening while balancing work, caregiving and leadership responsibilities.

Conditions such as endometriosis, menopause and hormonal health are often under-diagnosed or poorly understood. Nearly 7 in 10 working women in Singapore say social stigma prevents them from discussing menopause at work, and over 40% feel completely uninformed about it

At the same time, new research on the women’s health gap highlights a striking statistic. Women in Singapore live to about 85 years on average, yet spend around 12% more of their lives in poor health compared with men. Much of this gap occurs during the working years between 20 and 50, when many women are building careers and stepping into leadership roles.

These health realities rarely surface in boardroom conversations, yet they shape daily performance.

Globally, the picture is evolving in other ways.

The United Nations reports that women are increasingly leading initiatives in climate resilience, conflict prevention and peacebuilding. In many communities, women are the first to organise solutions when climate disruptions threaten food security or livelihoods.

But leadership in these areas often comes with intense pressure. These women are making decisions that affect entire communities while navigating resource constraints and political complexity.

Closer to home, Singapore’s cultural institutions are also amplifying women’s voices. The National Gallery’s International Women’s Day programmes this year explore themes of identity, creativity and leadership through art, dialogue and community events.

Across sectors, a common thread is emerging.

Women are stepping into more visible leadership roles, yet many are doing so while carrying pressures that organisations still underestimate.

Health responsibilities. Caregiving roles. Expectations to perform consistently at senior levels.

Recently, one executive shared that during a regional leadership call she suddenly lost mobility in her arm due to a perimenopause-related condition. She continued working through months of rehabilitation while managing a high-stakes leadership role.

Stories like this are more common than many leaders realise.

This is where resilience becomes practical.

Resilience is not about pushing through pressure. It is the ability to regulate stress, maintain clarity and recover quickly during demanding periods of work and life.

Organisations that recognise these realities are beginning to respond differently. They are building cultures where leaders can speak openly about challenges, access support earlier and maintain sustainable performance.

As we mark International Women’s Day this year, the most meaningful progress may not come from symbolic gestures.

It may come from understanding the invisible pressures many women carry and strengthening the resilience that allows them to lead with clarity, confidence and care.

Because when leaders are supported to sustain their health and wellbeing, organisations benefit from stronger decisions, better collaboration and more resilient teams.

Original Source: https://resiliencei.com.sg/pressure-women-leaders-face/