Team engagement and resilience in large organizations

Returning to work never really happens overnight. Some people return while others are still on vacation, pending tasks resurface at once, new priorities are added to existing ones. And managers find themselves reassembling their schedules, goals, expectations, and varying energies.  

It is precisely at this stage that the team's strength can be seen: not in the ability to accelerate immediately, but in that of finding an effective rhythm without transforming the restart into an overload.  

September 2026: The return comes at a particular time for organizations  

For many large organizations, September ushers in a busy operational phase. Projects and initiatives restart, final quarter deadlines come into focus, year-end goals are reviewed, and budgets, priorities, and plans for the following year begin to take shape.  

People therefore re-enter a system that has not remained idle waiting for them.  

And it's useful to connect this moment to a broader change affecting the European world of work.  

The new EU-OSHA campaign will come into force in 2026 Healthy Workplaces 2026–2028 – “Together for mental health at work”, dedicated to the prevention and management of psychosocial risks and to building healthier, more inclusive, and sustainable work environments. Furthermore, from October 19 to 24, 2026, the European Week for Safety and Health at Work will be dedicated specifically to psychosocial risk prevention.  

The issue, therefore, is not simply about individual well-being.  

It is getting more and more closely related the way work is organized, managed and made sustainable over time.  

Before the summer we had already observed how workloads, absences, digital boundaries and energy recovery make well-being an organizational and not seasonal issue in our in-depth study on summer, work and organizational well-being.  

The return allows us to take a further step: understanding how to rebuild engagement and operational capacity as the organization gradually returns to full capacity.  

Preventing burnout doesn't mean making people more resilient to everything  

The World Health Organization defines burnout as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, associated with exhaustion, increasing mental distance from one's work and reduced professional effectiveness.  

It's a useful definition because it shifts the perspective.  

If the problem arises in the interaction between the person and the work context, it cannot be addressed solely by asking people to manage stress better.  

EU-OSHA also links psychosocial risks to factors such as Excessive workloads, conflicting demands, poor role clarity, little participation in decisions, poorly managed organizational changes, ineffective communication, and insufficient support from managers or colleagues.  

The WHO guidelines on mental health at work also support individual interventions with two fundamental dimensions: organizational interventions and manager training.  

For this reason, the return offers organizations a good opportunity to avoid frequent simplification:  

asking people for resilience when what is needed is to increase the resilience of the system.  

Motivation isn't rekindled with a welcome back message  

The same goes for engagement.  

An energetic internal campaign, a kickoff, or a team-building session can be valuable. But they rarely compensate for a context in which priorities, autonomy, feedback, tasks, and responsibilities remain unclear.  

Engagement isn't simply about enthusiasm.  

It also comes from the ability to understand one's own contribution, have clear goals, receive meaningful feedback, feel involved in the decisions that affect one's work, and perceive that the effort required is sustainable.  

For this reason, especially in the restart phase, some conditions become crucial.  

Clarity before speed  

When many activities restart at the same time, the priority becomes making what comes first visible.  

A resilient organization doesn't simply ask people to do more: reduces ambiguity about where to focus energy and attention.  

Managers supported, not just empowered  

Managers are often asked to motivate, listen, organize, support change, manage performance, and simultaneously achieve their goals.  

Gallup data on managerial engagement suggests that considering them only as multipliers of the engagement of others risks being insufficient.  

Even those who lead a team need tools, development, and spaces for discussion.  

Resilience as distributed capacity  

A resilient person in a permanently overloaded system still remains exposed.  

Organizational resilience, on the other hand, arises from the interaction between individual skills, quality of relationships, work organization, managerial capacity, and the system's ability to adapt to unexpected events without continually passing the cost on to people.  

Listening for signals before the emergency  

Decreased participation, difficulty making decisions, irritability, increasingly long meetings, loss of concentration, or more difficult collaboration do not automatically mean burnout.  

However, they can be useful signals to read.  

Prevention works best when the organization develops the capacity to observe these dynamics before they become just problems to be managed.  

How we work on resilience, engagement and managerial capacity  

In Piazza Copernico we address these issues starting from an educational ecosystem logic.  

There's no single course capable of "creating engagement" or preventing burnout on its own. Instead, there are different skills that can be developed and integrated based on the organization's characteristics, the roles involved, and the current situation.  

On an individual level, the path The Resilient Professional works on stress recognition and management, self-care, balance, mindfulness and awareness.  

On the managerial level, the path Team Management It addresses dimensions such as motivation, purpose, feedback, delegation, trust, conflict management, and responsibility within the group.  

This is accompanied by training on People management and motivation, useful for exploring the dynamics through which to support people's self-efficacy and motivation without reducing engagement to a simple motivational push.  

And when the need does not concern a single path but the overall architecture of learning, through our activity of consulting for corporate training ecosystems We work with internal Academies on catalogs, blended learning paths, monitoring tools, communication strategies, and integrating training into the organizational culture.  

The goal is not to add training.  

It's about making sure that learning concretely supports the way people and organizations approach work.  

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