The Lowdown on Organisational Resilience
By WhyNot Partnering
The last few years have been particularly turbulent for one and all, with crisis after crisis coming at us from all quarters, everything from recessions and wars to increasingly extreme weather events.
No one has been spared and organisations of all shapes and sizes, across all sectors and industries, have had to make some quite significant changes to their operations in order to keep their heads above water and remain competitive in the face of seemingly never-ending turbulence.
The most obvious crisis in recent times is, of course, the global pandemic.
When coronavirus hit, the business landscape changed overnight, with lockdowns making it incredibly difficult for organisations to maintain their traditional ways of working. Innovative thinking came to the fore and businesses diversified their offerings in a raft of interesting ways to ensure their survival.
This ability to adapt quickly and respond to external events outside of your control is what’s known as business resilience, ensuring that you’re fully always prepared to handle both unforeseen and predictable goings-on.
Of course, there are all sorts of ways in which you can go about building resilience into your organisation, everything from diversifying to spread the risk and developing business networks and industry alliances to designing adaptations and redundancies into production, manufacturing, facilities, communications, HR, the supply chain and so on.
However, an oft-neglected aspect of building resilience – but perhaps the most important of all – is your people… your members of staff, your business partners and your customers.
Trusting and empowering your employees will naturally build a strong foundation for any resilient business, with clear communication the bedrock for developing a culture of trust at work.
Cultivating talent, fostering creativity and demonstrating care for everybody’s safety, health, and wellbeing is one of the best ways to go about ensuring you remain resilient no matter what.
In doing so, you’ll likely find that the knock-on effect of this is that a growth mindset is promoted as a result, with your people demonstrating discretionary effort, keen to develop, eager to push themselves and consistently looking for new opportunities for themselves and others within your company.
Before you know it, you’ll be seeing exponential growth.
Building strong relationships with your employees helps to put them in the driving seat, making them feel more valued and respected. This in turn inspires them to step-up, take greater personal responsibility, demonstrate leadership and start solving some of their own problems, rather than just throwing them upstairs (to senior management).
When your people are empowered in this way, the climate of your organisation is sure to improve, giving your operational resilience a serious boost at the same time.
To spur this on, now’s the time to focus on ideas like leading through the heart, strong communication, encouraging collaboration across the board, active listening and acknowledging and appreciating staff for what they do, ensuring that they know that they matter and the work that they do matters.
Remember that developing a resilient organisation is a team sport and it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Setbacks are inevitable but it’s how you react to them and what lessons you learn along the way that will mean the difference between swim or sink.
Not sure where to begin? Get in touch with WhyNot Partnering today to see how we can help.
