Recent months have certainly tested the limits and boundaries of organisational resilience like never before. However, despite Covid-19, the threat landscape has not significantly changed but rather we see evidence that it has intensified many pre-existing threats and risks to organisations. Whilst some organisations have coped well with the impacts of Covid-19, others have struggled to adapt to an environment that requires flexibility, rapid decision making and clarity of communication.
Crucially, businesses have seen that their long-standing practices of managing risk and responding to significant disruptions may no longer be sufficient to protect their personnel, assets, revenue, and reputation. To better understand our clients’ perspectives on these issues, Control Risks conducted the 2020 Global Resilience Survey and compiled the data to distil meaningful conclusions and trends to highlight how global business is practically implementing resilience programmes.
Our survey highlights that effective leadership is still regarded as one of the most important resilience principles and having a dedicated crisis or continuity leadership really seems to have made a positive impact, those organisations who had more positive business outcomes to Covid-19, were much more likely to have been supported by a dedicated crisis and continuity team.
The survey results also demonstrated that resilience professionals are playing a broader, more strategic role founded on better collaboration across traditional silos. More mature respondents noted that Covid-19 ‘reinforced corporate resilience effectiveness and value’. Much of the collaboration was attributed to the somewhat unique all-hands-on-deck, ‘people first, business second’ approach most companies took to the crisis. The sense of ‘facing a common enemy’ was not uncommon. Companies say this bred goodwill and took this as positive perception of their crisis response. However, organisations should not be complacent – the next crisis will be different!
The survey additionally highlighted that organisational risk and resilience teams would benefit from a joined-up approach that would enable organisations to better identify and track threats and risks. Closer working relationships between these two functions can improve the quality of risk management and additionally enable closer alignment in response to physical and cyber threats. With cyber threats on the increase, especially with the rapid up take in digitisation and remote working, joined up leadership will avoid threats falling between the gaps.
The survey confirms that Covid-19 has shone a light on the often underappreciated, yet incredibly valuable, role of resilience professionals. As our thoughts turn to ‘return to the office’ planning, employees and customers will expect to be walking into a safe and secure environment, meaning there is even more pressure to ‘get it right’ soon. By elevating the role of resilience leaders and recognising the value that they bring organisations will feel increased comfort that they are prepared and meeting their duty of care requirements, in perhaps a more efficient and effective manner.
Andy Cox is a Partner in the Crisis and Security Consulting practice at Control Risks. He delivers risk consulting services and business protection advice to clients across Europe and Africa.