Corporate resilience: taking into account the human factor
Businesses have adopted the concept of resilience, which originally applied to physics and psychology. While often seen as a matter of processes, resilience is primarily a human issue. A single individual, who has been impacted by a crisis, can in turn seriously impact an entire team. How to deal with this challenge? The answer with Alexandra Hoffmann, corporate resilience consultant.
Alexandra Hoffmann a une longue expérience de la sécurité au sein d’organisations diverses, d’Avon à Philips en passant par HP et Lafarge. Elle intervient aujourd’hui en tant que consultant spécialisé pour aider les entreprises à développer leur capacité de résilience et mieux résister aux événements disruptifs.
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Transcription
Understanding corporate resilience primarily means taking the human factor into account
In an extremely volatile environment, organisations need to be able to overcome crises in order to survive. To do so, they adopted the concept of resilience, which originally applied to physics and psychology, and can be defined as the ability of an object to spring back into shape after a shock. Private and public organisations then created a new role, ‘Chief Resilience Officer’ (CRO). This role, which includes, among other things, crisis management and business continuity, has now been implemented in a number of international companies and megalopolises.
While often seen as a matter of processes, resilience is primarily a human issue : companies can only be resilient through their people. A single individual, who has been impacted by a crisis, can in turn seriously impact an entire team or even an entire organisation. Beyond processes, the main challenge to a corporation that has been hit by a terrorist attack, an assault on one of its sites or any other type of crisis, is to help its people, including those who have managed the incident, overcome the trauma and find meaning again in what they do.
Soft skills are thus absolutely crucial. As a matter of fact, resilience far exceeds risk management, to which it is too often confined. So what do we do? There are at least two main guidelines:
- First, silos must be broken and egos transcended. CROs must go beyond their expertise, and actually walk hand-in-hand with their stakeholders;
- Second, raising awareness is key, and an inclusive approach must be adopted. CROs need to strive to embed resilience into the corporate culture, so that new beginnings can be made possible after a crisis.