Business Resilience

Ninety-nine percent of businesses in every U.S. community are small businesses, and they employ over 50% of the private sector workforce.

As we know, every community is susceptible to natural hazards, and businesses themselves are also vulnerable to human-caused disruptions.

The majority of small-to-medium-sized businesses, however, are completely unprepared for one of these emergencies. And when businesses suffer, the whole community suffers.

Unfortunately, after most disasters, about 40% of small businesses will not reopen. An additional 25% close their doors over the following two years.

Business resilience is vitally important.

Business Resilience

Business resilience is a business-wide term that comprises crisis management and business continuity.  It represents the ability of organizations to rapidly adapt and respond to all types of risks – such as a pandemic, natural disasters, cyber-attacks, supply chain disruptions, among others.

Besides the ability to face the consequences of a major incident, business resilience also includes the capacity of an organization to adapt and adjust to new operational circumstances such as the unanticipated loss of qualified employees and computer data breaches.

Business resilience planning is a governance and risk management responsibility that all small business leaders and entrepreneurs must address to survive and thrive in an increasingly hostile business environment.

Be Resilient

One primary key to business resilience is remaining positive so that you can maintain control over your work environment. With emotional intelligence, you can understand your feelings and know how to harness them.

A second primary key to develop business resilience is to achieve work-life balance. Technology has allowed us to have constant access to work, which makes finding this balance even harder. Through management displaying good work-life balance, employees, being reflexive, will also strive for work-life balance and thus becoming more resilient as well.

Resilient companies have a strategy and framework for risk identification and mitigation.  They use business continuity planning and emergency preparedness, develop flexible crisis and incident response capabilities, and implement business systems designed for redundancy and dependability.

Resilient companies:

• Build strong, trusted, and dependable relationships with customers;
• Become a preferred employer that can easily recruit and retain the best talent;
• Protect their revenues and reputation during a crisis; and
• Recover quicker than their competitors.

Best practices for better resilience

1. Identify what will make your business resilient, including organizational and technological factors.
2. Determine how to measure those factors so you can build appropriate metrics into your management structure.
3. Get proactive: set up extensive real-time monitoring and alert systems to measure performance and take action once a metric falls below expectations.
4. Establish procedures for evaluating technology innovations to determine whether your business should adopt them and how.
5. Base decisions on reliable, independent data
6. Build robust technology alliances that protect your confidential data and enable you to collaborate effectively.
7. Practice for disruption with regular and realistic testing of business continuity plans — and don’t forget that specific recovery plans are less useful and dynamic than the ability to create impromptu plans in response to unanticipated situations.
8. Help employees during disruptions, because without a resilient workforce you cannot expect to sustain a resilient business.

The Bible

Psalm 31:23-24 says.

Love the Lord, all his faithful people!
The Lord preserves those who are true to him,
but the proud he pays back in full.
Be strong and take heart,
all you who hope in the Lord.

Christians believe in God’s trustworthiness and live a life suffused with a strong sense of moral purpose, core values, and vision.

At the organizational level, especially for small and medium-sized businesses where leadership is focused on only a few individuals, trust in God becomes the critical success factor for the creation of organizational resilience.

Businesses must prepare for disaster.  But equally of importance, business leaders must prepare their hearts also for the disaster, and the Bible is the source for that preparation.