How to build a resilient organisation able to adapt to the years ahead
Levells' Madeleine Evans will be hosting a discussion group at the Employee Wellbeing Congress at 3pm on 16th September. The topic up for discussion is: How to maintain wellbeing through change, while keeping productivity at the forefront of your business. Register here to attend.
In these times, organisational resilience is thus a prerequisite for company survival. The ability of organisations to survive depends on their ability to recover from strain, stress and shock.
Organisational resilience: core components
We work primarily with what we call ‘people-centric organisations’: organisations whose business success relies on the capability and connectedness of their people.
For people-centric organisations, organisational resilience is a composite of two things:
- The resilience of individuals within an organisation, standalone.
- The resilience of relationships among those individuals.
Resilience is about addressing the root causes of crises while strengthening the capacities and resources of a system in order to cope with risks, stresses and shocks, according to the OECD.
Although this may sound complex, there are four simple steps that any leader can take to start to build the resilience of their organisation. These steps may not traditionally be accounted for in the enterprise resource planning process. They involve investing in resources and systems that support the stress-resilience of individuals in the company, and help them to build stress-resilient relationships as well. Here are four steps leaders can take to increase organisational resilience.
1. Don’t run your organisation too lean
By definition, resilience requires some level of buffer or excess resource. Without this, organisations are at risk of breaking under even a small change in the number of frequency of stressors.
In a changing world with unexpected shocks, it’s not intelligent to run at 100% capacity all the time. Instead, to build resilience, set a role model of running at ‘less than 100%’, and also let people within your organisation run at this pace, for similar reasons.
Organisations that run in a way which allows some excess energy and capacity are less likely to collapse under shocks or unexpected demand peaks.
2. Provide opportunities to build trust
In a crisis, people turn toward those they trust. But trust needs to be built over time through finding areas of common ground, open and honest communication day-to-day, and demonstrated alignment between intentions and actions.
To build organisational resilience, practice the communication and action patterns that will help foster and develop trust in your organisation’s mission or goals and in yourself as a leader. This also serves as good role modelling.
Likewise, provide spaces for individuals among and across teams to share what makes them tick and find areas of common values or interest. Facilitating the development of trust enables more honest communication and sustains relationships through change and strain.
3. Invest in tools to train awareness of one’s personal resources
Emotional intelligence – the ability to recognise and articulate our own emotions, and those in others – is a prerequisite for personal resilience and resilient relationships. Likewise, resilience requires being able to effectively gauge one’s level of personal resource to predict problems ahead and get the additional help where needed.
To build organisational resilience, help staff learn the skill of noticing how they feel (or others feel), and articulating this state by putting a label on it.
This can be done by role modelling emotional awareness yourself as a leader. Investing in tools to train emotional intelligence through daily reflection or checking in on one’s feelings, and labelling these, as well as training oneself to recognise and label the emotions of others.
4. Pre-emptively resolve small stressors, to avoid build up
Last but not least, increase organisational resilience by implementing a practice of identifying the daily items that cause excess strain, and resolve them.
These items may be small or large; having to deal with sub-optimal IT, working patterns that conflict with requirements that a family places on a staff member’s time, or communication patterns that are at odds and so are causing interpersonal problems.
By proactively taking action to reduce sources of strain, this frees up staff’s individual physical, mental and emotional resource, increasing the probability that they will have sufficient resource to respond to unforeseen shocks and changes later on.
In summary
Organisational resilience is defined as the capability of an organisation to recover quickly from adverse events, stress and change; it matters more than ever today.
This article is provided by Levell.
In partnership with Levell
A 360C wellbeing@work company, from strategy advisory&implementation to digital wellbeing platform.
