How To Maintain Workforce Resilience

This article was published on Forbes.com in February 2021.

While building a resilient organization has never been easy, the Covid-19 pandemic brought new challenges that were previously unthinkable. So how are top executives maintaining, and even strengthening, resilience amid the pandemic?

For Stephen Ives, president and CEO of YMCA of Greater Houston, the key has been ongoing communication.

“Our team met every morning for quite a while,” he says. “We spent time together regularly to process through what we were experiencing [and discuss] what we thought the right move was.”

To shed light on how businesses are maintaining workforce resilience, Forbes Insights conducted a survey of 1,001 U.S. mid-market executives in late 2020 on behalf of Capital One.

 

Speeding Up Adoption And Innovation 

According to the survey, nearly a third of executives (35%) are relying on remote work and collaborative technologies to help their employees remain productive and satisfied.

When asked how they’re building workplace agility (the partner of workplace resilience), 46% said they’re embracing agile workflows and methodologies that can reduce development cycles, meet user demands more quickly and ultimately lead to greater user adoption.

Digital transformation is hardly a new imperative. But for many executives, it was long a wish-list item—not something that had to be done now. 

Covid-19 changed that. Suddenly, entire organizations were forced to abandon their offices and cobble together remote workflow processes and customer-facing technologies.

 

Engagement Is Crucial To Community

People navigated the abrupt transition to work-from-home in different ways. While some employees welcomed the chance to drop their commutes, others found themselves coping with makeshift home workspaces and children in remote school.

Amid the changes, there was one common loss: community. Without workplace camaraderie, the connective tissue that creates strong teams can quickly fall apart.

That may be why executives shared that they’re increasingly concentrating on employee engagement as a way to improve both workforce resilience and workforce agility. More than half of executives (52%) said they’re paying closer attention to employee engagement as a resilience measure. They’re also eliminating silos to create more direct engagement and developing shared performance metrics that can apply to all employees.

For David Duncan, president and CEO of First Hospitality, improving engagement started with a better employee platform.

“We doubled down on a [human resources management system] to make sure we were taking care of our employees,” he explains. “From things as simple as mobile scheduling or being able to access their benefits, [now] they have the information they need to get their work done.”

 

Prioritizing Employee Wellness And Inclusion

When it comes to building a resilient workforce, paying more attention to employee wellness is top-of-mind for the C-suite: 64% of respondents identify it, in fact, as a top priority. Wellness can run the gamut, from creating a culture of empathy to making sure that you have a solid diversity, inclusion and belonging program in place.

“When we went through this rapid-fire crisis, our employees responded with grit [and it was] heroic work that they did,” says First Hospitality’s Duncan. “We realized pretty quickly that grit was only going to get us so far. We really needed to pay attention to the energy level and the wellness of our employees, and give them something to focus on beyond just the challenge.”

Nearly one-third of executives (35%) are also making efforts to invest in diversity, inclusion and belonging initiatives.

For the YMCA’s Ives, Covid-19 wasn’t the primary driver of his team’s new diversity efforts this past year. He said the conversation around racial inequality was the catalyst for his organization’s commitment to launching an Equity Innovation Center.

“As events in 2020 shone a huge spotlight on social unrest and racial inequality, we ramped up our efforts and response,” he says. “We’ve drawn in 15 to 20 partners who are working with us to elevate the conversation around implicit and explicit bias, undoing racism and the systems that support racism.”

He said that his organization started “internally with [its] own staff teams,” then moved to its partners and out into the greater community.

As the survey results show, creating a more resilient workforce requires a focus in areas ranging from collaboration tools to wellness efforts. For many leaders, implementing more innovative technology is paramount. For many others, resilience is best built through so-called softer managerial skills: collaboration, engagement, empathy.

 

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