What is Resilience?
How can you define or implement indicators for Organizational Resilience?
Blame Culture
It is important to avoid creating a “blame culture” within your organization. This can make people feel unsafe and unwilling to make decisions without escalating to a Senior Manager.
This kind of culture can create negative consequences, and is a hindrance to resilience. This is because decisions are slowed down, and are being made by a very small number of people.
The indicators of organizational resilience you are tracking, should be for actions that help an organization to take decisions and not the ones that only show who should be blamed.
What is resilience?
Empowerment
Junior Managers should be empowered to make decisions. Sometimes, mistakes will be made. However, if you trust your staff and they have good intentions, they should be empowered to make decisions. This will lead to a happier workforce and an organization that is moving forward. It is a much better alternative than an unhappy workforce and a stagnant organization that cannot move forward.
Incident Log
You should be keeping a robust Incident Log to record all the different incidents that are occurring. This way you can analyze trends and find out if you are learning from your mistakes.
If you see the same type of incidents occurring time and time again, this needs further investigation. You need to get to the root of the problem and set up a procedure to stop the problem from happening.
Culture of Learning and Improvement
This is essential to a resilient organization. Incidents will happen – it is how you deal with them, and more importantly learn from them that is the true test of your organization.
Regular Exercises
Conducting regular exercises is a great way to test your resilience. Check out this blog for more ideas on how to conduct an exercise.
Debriefs
Holding “hot” and “cold” debriefs after exercises and incidents, is very important. This is the information that should be fed into your learning and improvement programme.
Check out this blog on how to conduct a debrief.
If you want to increase your Organizational Resilience, start with preparing a Business Continuity Plan and check out BCP Builder’s Business Continuity Planning Templates.
