If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s the importance of ensuring individuals and organisations can handle – and bounce back from – disruptive, often unanticipated, events. Not only can being sufficiently resilient and prepared for the unexpected help businesses cope with the diverse threats they face today, but resilience can also give a competitive edge, helping organisations return to capacity fast and even spot fresh opportunities in times of crisis.
The pandemic was a global health disaster that impacted businesses at every level – and experts have called the next one an inevitability. But beyond that, businesses can encounter threats from a range of sources, from natural disasters and extreme weather events (ever more common thanks to climate change), terrorist incidents and increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. “Today, businesses face so many different disruptive events,” warns Ian Cooke, head of corporate and consumer services at NEBOSH. “You need to be thinking about how you manage them and protect your people from such incidents.”
This means that the HR function needs to be playing a much more active role in building business resilience. After all, any major incident is going to have an impact on people. And with resilience being central to commercial operations and future viability, HR professionals need to understand how disruptive events could affect the business at large.
For HR professionals looking to assess the degree to which their organisations are prepared for future disruption, here are three critical areas to consider…
Understand the importance of resilience
“Businesses that are prepared for disruptions not only bounce back quicker, but can also gain competitive advantage,” says Cooke. He gives the example of those organisations who had already implemented procedures to enable remote working in the event of an emergency being able to respond quicker during the pandemic. Their operations and revenues were less severely impacted and some were even able to win new business thanks to the simple fact they remained operational.
Resilience is central to the future success of any business, and therefore should be on the radar of every commercially astute HR professional. Even if they don’t directly work within risk management, people professionals should be aware of the potential impact a disruption could have on ways of working and people’s wellbeing, both physical and mental.
“People can get injured or hurt, and from a psychological perspective, these are traumatic events,” Cooke says. “Confusion can be the scariest thing, which is why good leadership is so important.” Another reason why HR should be involved in any risk management planning and response.
Identify key risks
Every business should have a risk register that considers internal and external threats. This will help to identify and compile potentially disruptive events. “The next steps are then to assess the probability of them occurring and look at how to mitigate and prepare for the ones that are most likely,” Cooke advises. Thinking about the likelihood and foreseeability of different types of disruption is important, along with how they could impact your organisation and the people connected to it. It has to be realistic rather than planning for absolutely everything that might happen.
There is another people angle here too, in terms of considering how best to manage communications around risk and disruption. “People need to know the basics about key risks and how to respond, but don’t bombard them with information about the technical aspects of disruptive events as this can cause unnecessary anxiety,” says Cooke. Providing ongoing education around potential disruptive events and how to respond, such as regular fire and security drills, can remind people of how to respond in the event of an emergency, but detailed response protocols should be on a need-to-know basis.
Coordinate risk response
Once you’ve identified risks and potential disruptions, plans need to be put in place to mitigate them. “No matter what the disruptive event is, you need central management of that disruption,” says Cooke. “Someone needs to be responsible for coordinating that response and it needs to be simple, such as having a gold-silver-bronze command structure.”
The response should be the same, whatever the disruption. As Cooke puts it: “You don’t want 15 different systems or responses.” Simplicity and clarity are your watchwords here. Having clear structure will also help people feel psychologically safer, as they will be more confident that leaders know what they are doing.
The most severely disruptive events are comparatively rare but building resilience into business-as-usual is crucial preventative maintenance. And while we all operate in an increasingly unpredictable world, Cooke concludes that learning to live with a certain amount of risk is both inevitable and even positive. “Take the time to understand potential disruptive events and to put in place risk controls, but remember to be proportionate,” he advises. “We all have to take some risks: that doesn’t mean we stop doing our jobs or living or lives. Safety allows us to do the things we want to do.”
NEBOSH has developed an online qualification with the International Institute of Risk & Safety Management (IIRSM), the NEBOSH IIRSM Certificate in Managing Risk which is the perfect choice for anyone who wants to be able to identify, evaluate, and manage risks and understand their impacts for their organisation. It looks at the relationship between risk management, business continuity, crisis management and organisational resilience.
Visit the website to find out more and how to study: www.nebosh.org.uk/iirsmrisk