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Almost every business now knows that it needs to become more resilient as the economy emerges from the pandemic. In addition to dealing with crises and global events, companies also need to outdo each other in the face of the many lesser-known disruptions that affect a company – from bottlenecks in the supply chain to shifts in demand and sudden skills shortages. Human resources play a big role in this, but doing this successfully requires rethinking, withdrawing from traditional administrative functions and scrutinizing the entire company like an outsider.

Even before the pandemic, many organizations realized that the HR department needed to change. In a survey of 1,362 HR executives in 55 countries in 2019, for example, the consulting firm KPMG found that 57 percent of respondents agreed that HR would quickly become irrelevant if it wasn’t modernized.

Just as logistics professionals are reshaping supply chains for resilience, HR professionals need to rethink what they can do to make their organization more agile.

Agility, although a buzzword, is essential for resilience and requires faster and more informed decisions at all levels of an organization, the dismantling of rigid internal hierarchies and the development of a highly collaborative internal culture that is united in its goals. Here HR should take the lead. The aim is to ensure that employees are more adaptable and on their feet faster, ready, able and motivated to seize new opportunities and use technologies that increase efficiency and reduce costs.

HR needs to encourage greater collaboration and decentralized decision-making to encourage innovation, experimentation and knowledge acquisition. The HR professionals in an organization should ensure that managers interact with employees in a meaningful way and promote a team culture that uses technology to share ideas that improve performance or productivity and bring together dispersed workforces. Two-way communication should be real to ensure that employees and managers understand each other and that employees know where their work fits into a company’s longer-term goals.

Additionally, teams should be able to make relatively small changes that improve their operations without obtaining multiple approvals. The HR department should facilitate this by ensuring that managers have a complete view of how teams are adapting their work through regular communication. By constantly exchanging ideas and trusting your employees to make the right decisions, the opportunities to improve resilience through a series of small decisions are significant.

Learning cultures

Organizations also need the HR department to create a learning culture that identifies and responds to individual needs and encourages knowledge acquisition and skills development. Employees should have access to everything from bite-sized information that meets an immediate need, to more detailed video content and other tools, all of which are accessible when needed.

To get really strategic, HR needs to interact with all stakeholders in an organization and apply a lens as if looking from the outside. Companies that use personnel analysis have an advantage here. Advanced workforce analytics platforms provide quick insights and the ability to create various positive or negative scenarios in terms of recruitment, retention, restructuring and reintegration, and provide the necessary agility if conditions suddenly change.

Companies that use analytics can develop their employee scenarios according to various parameters. Each scenario shows the impact on cash flow and productivity so that business can continue with minimal disruption. With the ability to plan what, with a range of probabilities, could happen, the HR department automatically increases its role within an organization and provides insight into decision-making in the boardroom.

Of course, there are many facets of HR that professionals cannot afford to neglect. The introduction of automation and technology that enables employees to remotely meet their own needs will relieve the HR department of much of the routine administrative burden. HR can hardly become a strategic source of knowledge if it still has to enter data into multiple systems and correlate it manually. Even when companies invest in employee support programs, employee well-being should be a higher priority when it comes to resilience and agility. A mentally resilient workforce ensures a more resilient organization. Deloitte, the global consulting firm, published an authoritative study last year that estimates that poor mental health costs UK employers £ 45 billion each year and that for every £ 5 spent on mental health interventions employers get £ 5 off Gain absences, presentability and employee turnover.

The HR department needs to ensure that mental wellbeing is viewed as a priority by the senior management of their organization and as a strategic pillar for greater resilience across the organization. Senior HR leaders should urge an explicit discussion of the issue in the boardroom and initiate cross-organizational welfare initiatives that enable trained employees to look out for one another and refer those who are struggling to more specialized help.

To sum up, HR plays an important strategic role in increasing the overall resilience and agility of the company by providing insights into the people and detailed scenario planning, along with a more active culture of collaboration that empowers people and their enthusiasm and uses her talent. HR departments need to be ready to rise above the day-to-day transactional tasks and responsibilities. Then they become strategic partners who build resilience and enable the organization to seize new opportunities.

Image by FelixMittermeier