Managing Resilience

Resilience is the ability of an entity to withstand and bounce back from shocks that test its ability for continuous profitable functioning.

Continuous profitable functioning is essential for maintaining high performance. Shifts in market conditions, technical breakdowns, stoppages, and strikes, significantly influence organisational performance and thereby the results an organisation can achieve. It is therefore essential to invest in resilience—both cultural, and operational.

Cultural resilience: The key drivers of cultural resilience is the level of cultural entropy and level of employee fulfilment/engagement. Highly engaged employees will have a strong level of values alignment and mission alignment with the organisation. Committed employees will gladly put in extra effort when times get tough. They will be willing to go the extra mile. Uncommitted employees go home and leave the problem behind them for someone else to deal with or pick it up the following day.

Monitoring the culture of your organisation by mapping the personal, current culture and desired culture values as viewed by employee and customers is an essential tool for managing the resilience of your organisation. 

Operational resilience: There are three key requirements for operational resilience:

• Availability of resources for production purposes—materials and staff
• Backup systems for production—equipment and machines
• Backup systems for software technology—data storage and production software

For each of these areas the organisation must have a contingency plan that can be easily put into operation.

Resources