There have been many takeaways from our experience during the COVID-19 pandemic, but a key lesson is the importance of business resilience.
What is business resilience? It’s a holistic focus on ensuring that operations, technology, facilities, and people can survive crises and chaos by mitigating risks through:
- Sound, documented processes
- A trained workforce that can enact those processes in a coordinated manner
- Versatile and effective technology solutions that can shape user experience in a secure manner to maintain or increase productivity
- Augmenting staff with the skills needed to tackle immediate challenges
- An organizational structure that’s agile enough to take quick and effective actions
These risks can come from cybersecurity breaches, the inability to access onsite resources, geopolitical events that affect supply chain, weather disasters, human capital challenges related to attrition, or technology failures. Business resilience goes beyond IT disaster recovery or organizational business continuity plans and focuses on people, processes, and technologies working together effectively and efficiently, no matter the event or its duration.
Challenges of the Pandemic
Looking back at March 2020, anxiety and uncertainty abounded as many of us went entirely remote and tried to figure out how to manage what we thought would be a short stint of working from home. Employee conversations focused on masking, home schooling, and which virtual meeting tools worked best. The impact, many leaders thought, would be short-lived and continuing seamless business operations and maintaining functionality and productivity weren’t immediate priorities. Some workers did have corporate laptops, mobile devices, and other technologies to support working from home, while others were figuring out how to do their work via email and on personal laptops and mobile devices.
The first major impact to most organizations was supply chain, and it wasn’t just personal protective equipment and cleaning supplies that were hard to find. Key end-user device technologies like monitors, mice, keyboards, and headsets for virtual collaboration were in short supply as organizations scrambled to accommodate a spike in the need for these resources.
The pandemic also exposed for many organizations major, long-existent gaps in business processes that needed closing. For example, in some organizations, line-of-business functions like HR had no virtual onboarding processes or no remote work policies to guide employees. Supply chain teams didn’t have an offsite copy of or remote access to key vendor contact information, access to ERP or materials management systems, or numbers for essential parts they frequently ordered. Finance was without master copies of key spreadsheets and budget information, except on on-prem file servers. Call center agents couldn’t do their jobs from home, and there weren’t plans already in place to support them. Without remote access to key data and systems, most of these line-of-business functions struggled.
Exploring Macro Trends
The pandemic has made evident and accelerated macro trends I want to explore further, each of which presents organizations with unique challenges and opportunities:
- The pandemic highlighted the need for agility and resilience. Protecting operations, technology, facilities, and employees from crisis and chaos is critical. Organizations that implemented command centers and already had organizational structures in place to deal with pandemic-related challenges have fared well in the face of adversity. Others found opportunity, leveraging core competencies in new ways — using alcohol distilleries to make hand sanitizer gel, switching from clothing manufacturing to mask making, or transitioning restaurants to take-out only. Resilient companies were 11 percent more profitable in Q2 2020 than in Q2 2019, according to McKinsey.
- The benefits of remote and hybrid work — less/no time spent commuting, flexibility, more time with family — will continue to shape worker demographics, job selection, and compensation packages. Rethinking the traditional 9-to-5, onsite work model will be the only way to attract and retain the best talent. Microsoft estimates that 40 percent of workers are considering leaving their employer, and two-thirds want remote or hybrid work. Post-pandemic, much of work will happen in various locations, in a decentralized way, across employee types. Distributed work models can yield tremendous cost savings thanks to reduction of physical office space, but it can be challenging to build and maintain work culture and sustain collaboration. Successful organizations have implemented effective remote access and collaboration technologies that have made the employee experience flexible, uniform, secure, and easy to use, all while enabling greater productivity. Organizations that didn’t respond to these trends, or even required employees to return to work early in the pandemic, have faced higher attrition rates and declines in employee productivity and engagement.
- The right technology is key to high employee engagement, retention, and productivity. Most employees have too many redundant collaboration tools, distractions that come with these tools, and cumbersome legacy apps. Organizations that delivered a consistent and secure work experience, robust collaboration tools, integrated digital workspaces to access apps, and work flexibility saw higher employee engagement. They also saw increased employee productivity because more employees were technologically connected to the organization for longer periods of time compared to before the pandemic. Having the right technology in place is critical to success with remote or hybrid work scenarios.
- Most organizations accelerated their digital transformation journeys by migrating to the cloud, adopting new workspace solutions, and adopting new security frameworks to secure assets in a decentralized environment. Cloud can deliver benefits including scalability, resilience, uptime, reduced operational effort, cost savings, and more. On the flip side, IT admins often give up control of and visibility into security and management of those decentralized digital assets. On top of that, they must deal with many hosting options — infrastructure as a service, vendor hosted, cloud hosted, cloud native, SaaS apps, and others — that can hamper the ability to secure and monitor an organization’s entire technology domain. Agile companies that invested in key IT systems and services saw higher ROI and profitability. Moreover, these organizations planned to invest more in highly scalable, secure, workspace and remote access solutions because of the impact on profitability. This trend should continue as the global IT budget is expected to increase over the next three years in strategic technology (and not just shifting dollars from other parts of IT).
- IT leadership has become an integral part of business transformation and business resilience discussions. Why? IT is no longer considered a cost center but is a value-add team to other lines of business that can help shape processes and enhance resiliency. IT is a change agent and a sounding board because of decades of experience implementing fault tolerant, highly available, resilient technology solutions, as well as the processes to manage them. Including IT leadership in business resilience and organizational strategy discussions, including tabletop exercises, documenting and implementing sound business continuity processes, budgeting discussions, risk analysis and compliance, and more has a positive effect on the organization. Ensuring IT has a seat at the leadership table pays off: Top-performing organizations are three times more likely to include technology leaders in strategic planning than the lowest-performing organizations. IT is also now looked upon to shape customer and employee experience and to automate routine tasks to gain additional efficiencies.
Resilient businesses that emphasized solid processes, agile decision making, investments in the right technology, and nimble organizational structures have survived and even thrived during the pandemic. Those that reimagined work fared better at reducing attrition, and having the right technology tools in place helped to improve employee experience, engagement, and productivity. Finally, those organizations that incorporated IT into their strategic planning and line of business decisions were more successful in surviving the effects of the pandemic. Focusing on business resilience will enable organizations to succeed in a rapidly expanding, decentralized work world and to be better positioned for the next disruption to come our way.
