This blog post is based on the third episode — Preparing for the Unpredictable — of a three-part webinar series, which can be viewed in full here. I was joined by a panel of industry experts including Dave Millner, Author and Founder and Consulting Partner at HR Curator; Dr Sharna Wiblen, Executive Educator and Digitalised Talent Management Scholar, Sydney Business School, University of Wollongong; and Gerard Lavin, Product Strategist, EMEA, Citrix.
Over the past few months, businesses have seen the world of work turned upside down. While many organisations had a business continuity plan (BCP) in place, most were focused on the role technology would play during an unexpected event. But what the global COVID-19 pandemic has shown us more than anything is that business continuity isn’t just about having the right technology in place. Rather, to be ready for the unpredictable, to limit disruption, and to ensure continued workforce productivity, organisations need to be placing their people front and centre. Organisations have come to see that business continuity isn’t something you can create a plan for and put in a box. It is something that you interweave into your daily working practices.
Gerard Lavin, Product Strategist, EMEA, at Citrix, explains: “A lot of BCP was disaster recovery: How do we respond to an event, from a technology perspective? The way a lot of organisations planned for that was backward looking, informed by previous events such as 9/11, which was a huge, but limited event. Businesses had to find a way to get their staff up and running again afterward, using something like a Sungard Availability Services office, containing some standby IT kit”.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic has been unprecedented in that it was global and not related to one specific IT infrastructure. So it required a very different reaction by businesses who all had to keep running at the same time.
“To respond to the situation effectively, organisations needed a solution that looked at the workforce first, and not IT,” Lavin says.
Have businesses shifted in their thinking toward business continuity?
They say “necessity is the mother of invention”, and following COVID-19, many business transformation plans that had been on the backburner for years due to security concerns, regulation restrictions and head count, were accelerated with companies rolling out Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Citrix VDI in a matter of weeks.
Dave Millner, Author and Founder and Consulting Partner at HR Curator, says: “The pandemic has gone way beyond any existing disaster recovery schemes organisations had in place . . . and suddenly we seem to have broken down a lot of barriers. Maybe that is because we are in crisis, or survival mode, but the way organisations have dealt with the situation, and the impact it has had on them, is very much aligned with their organisational resilience, which is their ability to adapt to change, deal with disruptions, and continue to be productive while situations are happening. The enormity of this challenge has embraced people, leadership processes, and customers; and that is why it has been so huge, and it has brought forward the future of work, to now.”
How do we build people into BCP moving forward?
Dr Sharna Wiblen, Executive Educator and Digitalised Talent Management Scholar at Sydney Business School, University of Wollongong, says: “This question leaves me a bit perplexed. How do you leave out the people who need to execute your operational needs, your strategy, as well as your business continuity plan? At the heart of strategy execution is still our people; at the heart of business continuity is still our workforce.”
However, over the past year, there has been a notable upsurge in interest around the subject of employee engagement, which was in motion prior to COVID-19.
“It has become very important because suddenly you can’t touch the people who you used to be able to connect with on a regular basis,” Millner says. “Engagement has always been a reactive process but continued listening and asking employees how they are doing will become an important theme as we move forward into the reset.”
He says people data (which he has recently published a book about) will become increasingly important within this.
Dr Sharna Wiblen agrees: “This is a reset . . . it is not an upgrade or downgrade. It is not an iteration of your business continuity plans. Our notions of travel, time with family, where work happens, outcomes, and output have all changed. We have a new lens to do some scenario planning of what is probable and what is possible, and now we have the opportunity, when we are devising those business continuity plans, to consider what happens if the world stops at the same time again.”
Post-COVID19, are organisations ready to redefine the routine of work?
While the technology has been there for quite some time, people and policies, along with issues of trust, have held back many business’ transformation plans. The global pandemic has provided organisations with the opportunity to redefine work entirely.
However, Dr Sharna Wiblen believes it is too early to predict the outcome the global crisis will have upon the routine of work. “The jury is out,” she says. “There are so many unknown variables at present. This was, first and foremost, a health crisis for the world, which was about saving lives: the economic crisis and schooling crisis were secondary. . . . Many countries are still in the middle of a health crisis, and it will be a while before they have the opportunity to think about how their workforce is structured, moving forward.”
Millner agrees, but says,“One thing I am sure of is employees will remember how they have been treated during this period”. He believes organisations that have not fared well in terms of how they have treated their workforce will need a strong people plan moving forward to reconnect with their employees.
Lavin is also concerned that when we transition out of this period, some organisations may be looking to take a more prescriptive approach to remote work. Instead, there needs to be high levels of trust and respect for the future of work to be redefined.
How well have leaders handled the crisis?
A recent survey by Hays Recruitment found that 51 percent of 16,000 workers polled rated their leadership’s response to the coronavirus outbreak so far as ‘excellent or good’, while 49 percent said their leadership’s response has been ‘OK to poor’. “This isn’t good enough,” Millner says.
Dr Sharna Wiblen explains that currently, leaders are having to make decisions based on “unknown unknowns”. She says that when it comes to business continuity, it is important for leaders to separate decisions from results. “Making a decision at a particular point in time is contextual, but in terms of how the results play out, and how we evaluate the quality of the leadership, so many factors and variables are changing for all of us, worldwide, that we need to look at the decisions being made and how leaders are owning them.”
According to Millner, leaders need to go back to basics and focus on the transformation agenda, which he believes requires four key qualities:
- Clarity — How do you communicate change?
- An energiser — How do you enthuse people?
- An experience builder — Someone who builds a good organisational experience
- A deliverer — Someone who keeps delivering through others
There is little doubt the COVID-19 scenario will surface bad leadership habits and practices very quickly. “Great leaders should know what to do . . . it doesn’t matter what the context is. This is a crisis, but we shouldn’t use it as an excuse for bad leadership,” Millner says.
Additionally, Dr Sharna Wiblen hopes the event will encourage leaders, particularly, to harness their inner Snow White and start looking in the mirror at their behaviour. “COVID-19 is a fantastic opportunity for us to pause and reflect, look in the mirror and think about our actions, and whether they would warrant criticism or applause.”
How do organisations succeed during times of unpredictable events?
The key thing most businesses will take from the global pandemic is the need to plan for a similar future event. Life is unpredictable, and the concept of business continuity requires organisations to have agility and resilience in their systems, policies and practices.
However, Dr Sharna Wiblen believes the COVID-19 crisis has served to highlight how many businesses did not know what their success parameters were to begin with. As businesses gradually move out of survival phase, she says they must think about how they want to move forward and what their new success parameters will be before they make any critical decisions or changes.
“There’s an analogy I like to use where I say technology is a quick release drug, and most transformation that is useful is a slow release drug,” Dr Sharna Wiblen says. “The challenge is that the whole world has potentially used a quick release drug and we don’t know what the side effects from that are. If we make changes in small increments we can experience, see what success is, tweak, and reiterate. A lot of tech and digital transformation can only support us when we have a clear idea of what we want to do, which will help lead us into that process of success.”
Looking Ahead
An important lesson that businesses need to take from the experience of a global pandemic is that people drive productivity. Great technology is nothing without people, and I hope that as we move forward and plan for the unpredictable happening again, organisations will approach business continuity in a more human-centric way.
