Resilience is crucial in today’s world — and for a business, it’s more than just a state of bouncing back. With coronavirus impacting the economy, taking the necessary steps toward resilience has the ability to make or break your company during trying times. In such unpredictable circumstances, what can you do to assure your business is prepared for the unpreparable?
Have Multiple Plans
Planning for stability is easy when things are stable, but entering the unknown comes with a handful of new and unexpected challenges. The first step to being resilient is to account for a variety of different circumstances beyond traditional risk factor calculations, how they might impact business and how you could best recover from each scenario: What can we do if we risk losing ‘x’ amount of money in this timeframe? Could we maximize other opportunities if business as usual had to temporarily stop? Having this multi-timescale perspective available to everyone in the company creates a level of certainty that allows workers to better adapt, especially compared to businesses that have strict or unconsidered procedures for change.
Trust Your Employees
Managing diversity also expands beyond hypotheticals. Each employee offers their own unique capabilities, so having a flexible work environment will allow those skills to thrive and lead to quicker recovery times. Trusting employees to create the workflow that works best for them offers a fresh perspective on ways to restructure your business based on the needs of any unpredictable scenario. Plus, allowing variance and inviting collaboration makes for an ongoing trial and error process to find out what will work and what won’t.
Know the Benefits — And Learn From Them
It’s important to remember that the benefits of resilience are not necessarily immediate, rather, they progressively increase a company’s opportunity for success throughout multiple encounters with uncertainty. These include being able to better recognize threats and knowing how to plan for them, resisting the original shock of dilemmas by having a readily available plan, experiencing quicker recovery times, and developing the ability to better manage future crises.
Keep Your Guard Up
Perhaps the most vital part of planning for resilience is to make sure that developing a plan isn’t a one-and-done situation. Constantly measuring and reconsidering the adaptability of your business and analyzing new or reanalyzing old procedures will allow your plans to evolve with the economy and your employees. Resilience isn’t a “one size fits all” action for every business, so recognizing how to utilize your strengths and account for any weaknesses in the face of uncertainty will help maximize opportunities to not only recover, but come out stronger on the other side.
To learn more, read the full article at Hayward Business Review here.
