The case for individual and collective Resilience

Our Physics professors taught us that resilience is the ability of a body to absorb shocks and return to its original state. In real life, it is the strength to overcome adversities and hardships and to keep growing despite that.

For the better part of the year, our collective resilience has been put to the test. On one hand, in our personal lives, we had to try to find a new work-life balance while being confined. We were all concerned for the health and safety of our loved ones and our future.

On the other hand, our professional lives were also touched by the pandemic and we had to turn to Resilience, to show us the way out. And with countries like France, Germany and Ireland entering second lockdowns, we will have to work on this skill all the more.

So, let’s see what Resilience entails in a professional context.

Resilience at the workplace

As leaders, one of our missions is to anticipate future trends and build plans for up to 3 to 4 years. These plans are like our North Star that guides us and defines our roadmap.

Despite these well thought out plans, we have to often shift our sails to overcome the unexpected headwinds that come our way. To do this, we need to become Resilient. Resilience works like a muscle memory, the more you put it to work, the stronger it becomes.

It’s what we’ve been doing for the past 70 years – learning and adapting our business, our ways of working and our profitability to come out stronger from each crisis. The pandemic is indeed not the first unforeseen event we have had to face. To mention a few: the oil crisis in the 70’s, the financial crisis in 2008, and more recently the Brexit.

While the disastrous effects of the crises, like the one we face at present, shouldn’t be underestimated, we shouldn’t neglect the fact that they also help us push ourselves to do better. As it is during adversity that we are at our most creative and most innovative. For example, with the health crisis, there was no option but to find new ways to manage more than 160,000 payment deferral requests we received in just 3 months. To do so, we relied on our Robots competence centre to build automated processes, enabling the teams to cope with this huge and unexpected influx of requests.

Another positive consequence of this crisis are the huge leaps we’ve made in digitalisation. Before the lockdown, some of our sales partners weren’t convinced of the utility of our digital tools such as the e-signature. But with the social distancing measures and the lockdown, they realised the benefits of such tools. And this helped us in boosting the digitalisation of our processes and hopefully in the long run, our efficiency.

On a more personal level

As in our professional lives, our personal lives were also upended: lockdowns leading to isolation sometimes away from friends and family, our houses doubling as classrooms and offices, concern for our health and our future… We also had to find Resilience in us to adapt to the constantly shifting social and economic conditions.  

Like many, I have had a difficult year too: I lost some of my loved ones and had a car accident that could have marked the end of my life.

But more than anything, this gave me a newfound appreciation for everything I have and the motivation to live my life to the fullest, both professionally and personally.

I know these are dark times but past experience and my constant companion, Resilience tells me that there are many wonderful things to look forward to - there will be new projects to launch, new people to meet, new friends and family members,  new artists to support, and so many more adventures that await on the other side of these difficult times.