Companies are evolving faster than ever. Every company needs to constantly prepare for the next storm. This period of resilience-building will help businesses set their priorities, prepare a survival kit, and support resilience initiatives to recover and adapt to new business landscapes to continue thriving. Read on to learn more about the measures you can take to address the current pandemic and crises to strengthen your company’s resilience through strategic planning in the future.
What is Business Resilience?
Simply put, business resilience is how quickly a company can adapt to changes that affect its day-to-day processes. Let’s delve more into what makes a resilient business:
- Business Agility: Is the ability to constantly adapt and build agile teams and processes that respond to difficult situations and thus become stronger.
- Corporate Foresight: Is an organization’s ability to anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to incremental changes and sudden disruptions from an external perspective.
- Business Flexibility: Is the ability to adapt quickly to upheaval and to protect its people, assets, infrastructure, business processes, and operations, as well as its financial and human resources.
- Corporate Resilience: Corporate resilience is defined as the ability of a company to respond quickly to business disruptions and protect its people and assets while maintaining continuous business operation. It is also known as continuity planning, and it aims to adapt to difficult situations, recover from them quickly, and protect its employees, customers, resources, the business environment, and employee health and well-being, while ensuring that the system is running smoothly.
If your business is resilient, you increase your chances of long-term business success and sustainability. In the next sections, we’ll describe what you need to know about building business resilience, including the best practices every company should adopt.
Best Practices for Business Resilience
What does resilience mean for your organization, and what are the following framework conditions for covering actionable positions and quantifiable risk measurements to measure the success of your company’s resilience strategies? You need to start building entrepreneurial resilience by utilizing the processes and technologies you already have. They must incorporate new strategies that address surprises and take into account best practices in the industry, such as risk management, risk assessment, and risk mitigation.
Risk Assessment
Going through a formal risk assessment process can be a very effective way to prioritize your efforts and bring clarity on your long term plan and strategy. Entrepreneurs need to identify the key features of the business that contribute to resilience, what initiatives need to be taken to improve it, and how it would respond to disruption when it occurs.
Feedback Loop
Receiving feedback and ideas directly from your employees will have a significant impact on building long-term entrepreneurial resilience.
Cyber Resilience Framework
A framework for cyber resilience allows for changes in data protection and recovery practices to better align with today’s malicious attacks.
Careful Operations Planning
Achieving business resilience requires careful planning of business operations to ensure that the business model is able to adapt to new markets and other changes, guaranteeing business continuity.
Business Capability Planning
IT resilience and business capability planning can be the sole reason for the long-term success of your organization. Hence, you need to make sure that it is adapted and put to practice. As part of your business capability analysis, you need to model what a company does or needs to do to achieve its goals, rather than how it achieves them so you can evaluate results, identify business risk areas, and prioritize investments, particularly in terms of time, effort, and money.
Strategies for Business Resilience
In addition to creating a framework to deal with the consequences of major incidents, the resilience of companies is also related to the ability to adapt to new environments and circumstances after an incident, such as the creation of a new business model, products and services, and onboarding new talents to adapt the company to the new circumstances after the incident.
Tools and Solutions
The other feature of the organization’s resilience is very technological: Robust technology alliances protect confidential information. This process requires automated, integrated real-time monitoring and management. Much of the company’s resilience is indirectly related to challenging assumptions, such as an organizational culture that encourages continuous employee training and a trustworthy network. But much of this is, directly and indirectly, related to the development and implementation of new technologies and processes. Make sure you use digital tools to analyze risks and develop prevention and recovery strategies that can build on profits to grow in the event of a crisis.
Understanding Your Customers
Are resilience and genuine customer service important for you and your company, not just for your customers? In today’s environment, customer experience and customer service are optimal, and we need customer intelligence to gain crucial insights.
Know Your Best Customers
Knowing the best customer has a lasting impact on your businesses. Once you have developed a program to cater to the needs of your loyal customers, you are bound to generate long-term profits.
Predict Customer Behavior
Predicting customer behavior is critical to stimulating cash flow and building customer confidence.
Boost Customer Experience
Every thriving business needs to have an intensive focus on what the customers want, their experiences, needs, as well as expectations.
Adapt to Changing Customer Needs
Companies must also be ambivalent and adapt to the needs of consumers without compromising the overall consistency of the brand.
Redesigning Culture
An organization with a strong culture is designed to withstand disruption. It is easier to adapt to decisions when priorities shift while core values remain stable. We can remove organizational barriers that could prevent diversification, new business models, or innovation. With strong cultures, managers and their teams know their purpose. Hence, they coordinate better while making a decision. This makes the resulting behavior more resilient and less prone to change when it responds to new circumstances.
Reinventing Customer Experience
By reshaping the customer experience of your company, businesses can be prepared to face the challenges head-on. Companies require loyalty to remain agile in the face of these challenging times. Business leaders need to make use of advanced analytics in order to test as well as optimize the customer journey and third-party objectives to create a customer experience that promotes loyalty. Cultivating an innovative and reinventive culture will help you continually serve your customers with the highest level of customer service and the best possible customer experience. You also need to create and develop new channels through which customers can approach you. Make sure that they feel heard at every turn.
Revitalizing the Workforce
Most managers now have the opportunity to improve their performance by strengthening and reshaping the culture in which they work. During COVID-19, studies show that four in ten US employees agree that their job is worth something.. This is an alarming situation because the corporate culture starts with the purpose of the organization. If the organizational culture is weak, its employees are not focused, which makes the organization less resilient and less effective in the long run. It can also reduce the brand value of the organization, and in turn, the company loses flexibility, innovation, and speed. Companies have a responsibility to their employees to achieve their goals, not only in terms of performance but also in terms of the health of the organization. This is an opportunity to demonstrate the company’s values to the customers, keeping in mind that your employees are in sync. Organizational values can also be incorporated into a well-established system to foster effective decisions. The purpose, mission, and vision of an organization should strengthen in the face of change.
Leadership and Management
If the pandemic has taught business leaders anything, it is that the question is not whether the next crisis will come, but when. As the next change can occur at any time, managers and their organizations must be constantly prepared. According to our staff, the US Government’s response to the recent outbreak of coronavirus in the United States is far from complete. Most employees in the US do not believe that their organization is prepared for a pandemic, and most business owners believe that the coronavirus situation will continue to have a negative impact on their business. Leaders can bridge this trust gap and build resilience by exploring best practices for crisis management in world-class organizations.
Renewing Leadership
Disruption can put leaders in a reactive state when addressing high-priority issues. They use crisis management to promote flexibility and resilience.
- Rededicate Core Leadership Values: Update leadership development and work with leaders to promote the culture and performance of your teams. Leaders, too, need to revise their tactics. Even though they cannot fully predict this, they can be prepared to bring their best leadership to the negotiating table to manage crises like COVID-19. Employees need to be inspired and walked through the entire process by their superiors so that they can be prepared. We need to understand the importance of knowing our strengths and implementing them in the right direction. We also need to work on our leadership values to make effective decisions on a daily basis. Cultural values must be in the spotlight, and key leadership messages must be reinforced.
- Prioritize Managers: What are the strengths that enable managers to head towards the difficult times and lead their team? How can managers gain control to bring about a change in the organization? Companies need to prioritize the development of managers to position leaders at all levels for success, and leaders should not solely be satisfied with themselves but rather with their team.
- Prioritize Employees: COVID-19 had a dramatic impact on the workforce that led to major upheaval. We need to collaborate in a way that the team identity remains intact. . However, changes in mindset and leadership style are required to lead to a workforce of the times to come. Leaders must continuously prioritize their employees and develop new and better systems that are able to engage their teams and inspire them to perform better than ever. They must develop sustainable human resources strategies and address the issues related to the long-term health and well-being of a company. These new issues provide an opportunity to rekindle employment policies that can help leaders overcome long-term uncertainty.
When leaders take responsibility to prioritize all dimensions of corporate performance, they focus on the matter at hand, inspiring their team in the process. To this end, we should continually be reshaping our work culture and the customer experience we provide, renewing our personnel strategy, and updating our leadership development process.
Planning Business Continuity and Business Resilience
Planning the resilience of companies allows them to adapt quickly to the new normal in the event of disruptions while maintaining operations to protect their employees, data, revenues, and reputations. It is essentially a strategy for companies to defend themselves and respond quickly and effectively to maintain their operational performance and competitiveness in the wake of serious disruptions. Build your strategy with Universal Creative Solutions. We understand the challenges of unprecedented times, and we believe our years of experience in helping businesses thrive shall ease the business continuity planning process. Our proven and tested strategies can help you minimize business risks, and our expertise will ensure robust strategies are built out for greater business resilience.
