More than ever, crisis response teams worldwide need to encourage team resilience to keep navigating the ongoing challenges from 2020 and those emerging in 2021.
“If long term workforce resilience isn’t at the top of your priorities, it should be.” – Jason Thewlis, QBE
With work-from-home arrangements to distributed staff teams, an increase in expected natural disaster events, and an ongoing public health crisis, the ability for organizational teams to continue to thrive throughout 2021 should be the foremost concern of every organization.
Although ‘team building’, ‘resilience’ and ‘organizational culture’ have been trending terms over the last few years, how organizations can build team resilience—especially during already challenging times—is less often discussed. Further still, how technology can play a role in supporting organizational and team resilience even less so—so let’s look at how we can bring these two together.
Why Build Team Resilience?
Organizational resilience is the cornerstone of a positive work environment, a healthy corporate culture, and the foundation of a team’s ability to navigate challenging events. Knowing that the ongoing and expected challenges of 2020-21 will require teams to pace their resilience abilities over—at least—the next 12-months, organizations must equip their people with the skills and resources needed to minimize long-term critical event burnout and fatigue.
At its core, organizational resilience refers to an organization’s ability to adapt and evolve to changing environments. Throw in the need to prepare for and respond to both internal and external influences, organizational resilience requires teams to be both proactive and responsive to potential change.
By building a dynamic response to potential critical events, organizations can adapt to evolving needs and challenges and stay flexible—and safe—during uncertainty.
How Can Technology Support Your Crisis Response?
Knowing that teams need dynamic systems to best support organizational resilience, the old approach to responding to critical events can no longer keep up with our rapidly changing environment.
By incorporating innovative technology solutions into an organization’s resilience building program, Software-as-a-Service digital tools (SaaS) can support distributed workers, remote crisis monitoring, and speed up the ability of a team to respond to an unfolding event.
By hosting online applications and services via cloud hosting, SaaS applications allow teams—regardless of their location and potential threats to on-site ICT infrastructure—to rely on their business-as-usual platforms to navigate critical events. Want to learn more about how digital tools can help build organizational resilience? Read on to check out some of the best benefits to incorporating digital tools into your crisis response.
4 Ways Technology Can Help Build Organizational Resilience
By adopting digital solutions, organizations worldwide can benefit from cloud-based applications to support flexible and dynamic team responses during day-to-day functions and critical events.
Instead of expecting a team to navigate an unfolding event with unfamiliar applications, existing technology solutions can integrate with teams’ everyday tasks to encourage ease and accessibility—key components to critical event success.
Check out how Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) digital tools can further bring your team together:
1. Support Efficient Coordination and Team Response
Remote workforces require leadership teams to coordinate dispersed people and resources in real time. Digitalized communication platforms–like CQ—can support this by helping to create a single operating picture from anywhere in the world.
Using collaborative fact and assumptions boards, interactive task boards, and centralized document storage, crisis response teams can coordinate and assign tasks to minimize the reliance on finite key personnel during a long-term event and reduce the risk of crisis burnout and fatigue.
2. Encourage Real-time Communications.
By integrating with everyday team communication platforms like MS Teams, SaaS tools can connect crisis response teams with mass notification platforms to disseminate critical information and action plans.
Two-way communication options that allow remote response personnel to triage the wellbeing and safety of their people further supports navigating a critical event from the top-down and bottom-up.
3. Support Flexibility and Adaptability.
Need your people to work-from-home during a potential threat? Deliver real-time messages to your whole community through a platform they already use and ensure they receive the message.
2020 proved that when critical events unfold, they can unfold far and fast. Digital critical event tools can empower your team to enact a successful response by quickly escalating potential events and responding with speed.
Instead of preparing for an expected threat with only one viable course of action, critical event technology can allow teams to receive up-to-date information as an event evolves, conduct impact assessments, and distribute role-based action plans to help teams pivot when needed.
4. Speed.
Speed being one of the most critical factors to successfully navigating a critical event, organizations can leverage SaaS tools to speed up communications, source intelligence, and keep teams working together during a critical event.
Knowing that the whole organization can actively participate in navigating a threat, further risk and impact can be mitigated by keeping teams together.
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Digital tools–including SaaS applications–can support teams navigating critical events with a whole organization approach. Knowing that the ongoing challenges of 2020-21 will test even the most resilient crisis response teams, equipping whole organizations with the tools needed to navigate events together can pace our coping capabilities, reduce the pressure on finite response people, and help navigate an event with efficiency and speed.
Instead of relying on traditional approaches to building team resilience and navigating critical events, consider adopting technology that better reflects today’s threat environment. Your team—and their ability to cope with and navigate ongoing challenges—will thank you for it.
