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As a result of the pandemic, your clients, no doubt, are looking for ways to better anticipate and respond to any new threats arising from changes to the business environment. It won’t be an easy ride for them, though. Why? One of the starkest challenges to business resilience your clients are facing: their pre-COVID baseline of crisis readiness.
Indeed, a cursory look at the state of business resilience of today’s organisations suggests too many firms are starting at a deficit. A global crisis study, for one, found that as many as 95 per cent of business leaders report that their crisis management capabilities need improvement.
What’s more, over 30 per cent of business leaders report that they did not have a designated core crisis response team when the pandemic first began. Only 35 per cent had a crisis response plan they deemed very relevant.
Sure, the pandemic served as impetus to many of those companies to improve their numbers, by examining their crisis response capability, incorporating insights and lessons learned into longer-term strategy, and building muscle memory to strengthen preparation and response capabilities. New challenges loom on the horizon, though.
Client’s level of organisational resilience still not where it needs to be
Sure, your clients are likely becoming more attuned to the importance of business resilience. But is it an all-staff effort?
According to the Future of Business Continuity Report, it’s not: while 40 per cent of management teams are very aware of the role of resilience in their organisation, only 16 per cent of staff is.
That’s not good enough. Additionally, the pandemic has also led to ongoing restrictions on public meetings, gatherings, working arrangements, and travel, as well as severe interruptions to the flow of goods, due to supply chain disruptions.
Just the rapid uptick in remote work alone created significant business resilience challenges for your clients. More likely than not, their remote workers do not have the same resilience measures applied to them as those in the office.
Key step to improving your client’s level of organisational resilience
What can you do? Beyond helping your clients better understand the risks posed by the volatile business environment, you can also work towards building up an effective leadership class.
The aim, here, should be a demonstrated competency in the following areas:
- Leadership encouraging a culture supportive of resilience
- Leadership that can adapt to changing circumstances
- Leadership that deploys a diverse set of skills, knowledge, and behaviour to achieve organisational objectives
How to go about it? By in large, organisations with a resilient leadership class have prioritised and resourced the following activities:
- Developing trusted and respected leaders who act with integrity and are committed to a sustained focus on organisational resilience
- Assigning roles and responsibilities for enhancing organisational resilience
- Creating and sharing of lessons learned about successes and failures
- Promoting the adoption of better practices
- Empowering all levels of the organisation to make decisions that protect and enhance organisational resilience
It doesn’t stop there. Those same leaders will need to turn around and implement resilience-enhancing practices; they also need to keep track of the follow through. Not sure how your clients should go about it? We’ve got you covered: download our latest guide, Five Steps to Enhancing Organisational Resilience
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