Organisational resilience: Don't forget the human factor
It’s critical to nail operational, financial, and other aspects of resilience in this uncertain world but don’t ignore social and employee resilience.
Organisational resilience is a widely cited target of organisations everywhere and clearly an area of growing interest if we look at Google searches.
All want "bounceback-ability", elasticity and, at the same time, a bullet-proofing or iron-cladding that protects and buffers them, whatever the shocks or vagaries of the commercial environment. After the Covid pandemic, we all know that black swan events are rare, but they do occur, so preparedness is key. However, we perhaps don't talk enough about resilience as it applies to the most important levers of a business - that is, the people who work within it.
When we do talk about resilience, we often use it in the context of toughness of an organisation or a material. "Resilience (noun): the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties" is one dictionary definition. In more recent times, organisational resilience has become a common term for the durability of organisations to withstand the harsh conditions that abound today.
We think of how businesses, for example, can deal with high inflation rates, with geopolitical turmoil, technological changes such as the explosion in AI, the growing competitiveness of emerging and non-G7 economies, or rising commodity prices. We know that malleable supply chains, developing new routes to market, innovative product offerings and changes to the ways we sell and market can help us to survive and thrive. We note the example of Covid and the way restaurants and entertainment companies virtualised their offers, or the way businesses remained productive by implementing remote working. And yet, we know that much of what success boils down to in areas such as professional services organisations is the human factor: how we as individuals and teams cope with - and manage - whatever life, the economy and our changing world can throw at us.
The many faces of resilience
Resilience is really an umbrella term that covers several distinct facets.
Strategic resilience. The ability to respond and adapt to broader political, economic, social, technical, environmental or legal changes.
Financial resilience. The preparedness of an organisation to deal with fiscal-related processes.
Organisational resilience. This lets a company identify and react positively to incidents that impact talent, operations, business continuity and supply chain. Note that this includes cultural resilience too, which means defining, living and breathing cultural values. An example here could be as acting on the need for diversity in leadership but also across the organisation.
Social resilience. And finally, the one we come to here: the ability to understand the effect on the human community which the organisation impacts. Social resilience covers both customers and partners but also employees, the people most exposed to the actions of the organisation.
Social resilience in action
Today, all too often, any references to social resilience are in the abstract. Organisations sometimes treat customers as elements on a dashboard that can be manipulated by offers, discounts or upsells. Employees can sometimes be viewed less as unique people, but more as commodities to be moved around to suit business processes or spikes and troughs in demand.
Of course, it's crucial that we have HR systems that can track where people are, what they can and can't do and when they are available, for how long and at what cost. These are the table stakes of Time & Attendance systems.
However, there is another form of employee resilience that is more important and which ties to how we treat people, empathize with them, and understand their needs. Again, we may go back to the Covid pandemic and the ways in which there was a mushrooming realisation of the importance of wellbeing. Of course, how organisations were able to look after their people and their needs - both during and outside of the working day - will have been critical to building cultural bonds that feed into retention and outperforming. In the Professional Services sector, which has rates of attrition of between 10% and 15%, according to SPI's Professional Services Maturity Benchmark Report, that ability to go above and beyond basic expectations is priceless.
Increasingly, we also see companies forging bonds with their local communities and giving their staff the time to explore the passion they feel for charitable or social projects.
Other approaches are practical and pragmatic. Building in career paths and training are becoming better understood. For the first time, SPI said that the average number of training days in PSOs has surpassed 10 annually. The old pre-conception that training investments will only encourage staff to leave for rivals is no longer a defence, even if many do in fact depart. Many CHROs know that building networks with alumni will often lead to increases in brand reputation and boost their chances of hiring "boomerang" employees.
Another key factor comes in the deployment of technology. Do you have the modern tools for people to do their best work? Can employees monitor their own progress? Do systems support the ability to work from multiple locations and across mobile devices? Do you go so far as to gamify performance to create a competitive and fun culture? For younger employees in particular, any sense that they are working at a dinosaur organisation needs to be urgently addressed.
Let's be realistic here too. The basic carrots of salary, pensions and bonuses are as valid as ever yet within organisations in people-centric-sectors, such as professional services and in knowledge management more broadly, the need to focus on individuals to build out the culture that leads to high performance and high retention levels is critical.
