Solving Resilience

Making workforce resilience obtainable.

I've been exploring the term "workforce resilience" and how it applies in various aspects of business. It's worth noting that while there are many different perspectives on what this means, we believe that organizations need to be “resilient” enough to bounce back, “agile” enough to bounce forward, and employees need to feel a sense of “belonging” to repeat that process, so that the business may evolve. ?

Long-term benefits arise when we take a connected view; considering business, teams, individuals, and how workforce resilience applies in each instance. Ultimate value comes from tackling all the elements together.?

Having said that, I also want to acknowledge that when it comes to undertaking projects or initiatives, “BIG” things are often seen as hard, complex, more likely to fail or too slow to prove their value. ?

Coming back to the idea of a mental model that I explored in my last post (as in how you see the world is not how I see the world), I can appreciate how a vague term such as “Workforce Resilience” might not be focused enough for some. ?

I understand this concern, but I don’t agree with it.?

Personally, and when working with clients, I see a series of steps building momentum TOWARDS a goal (i.e. workforce resilience). There is no endpoint because it’s really about the aspiration and mindset. You do not just achieve it and stop!??

Just to reaffirm this principle, say "we have achieved the future of work" and then pause to comprehend how meaningless a statement it is. ?

You must focus on the journey.??

Agile Human Resources

?So, I see everything as a series of steps. Building workforce resilience is the same. The thing I often struggle with is communicating to people that while I see the steps, I don't always know in what order.??

In this instance it makes sense to me why Agile project management has become so popular. After all, if you're putting together a product (or people on Mars), you can’t know all the answers straight away, and when you hit issues with delivery time or scope creep, you must readjust. ?

If, in these instances, scrum and agile project management are the accepted model, then why are we not applying these same principles within Human Resources and the workforce??

For those of you unfamiliar with it, Agile is an approach to managing projects that focuses on delivering high-quality outputs (often software) in a shorter timeframe. If you are familiar with it, you can skip ahead, but here’s a quick overview: ?

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The AGILE approach is based on the principle of "iterative and incremental development", where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. ?

SCRUM is a popular Agile framework where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. ?

Scrum SPRINTS set periods, say 2 weeks long, during which Agile teams work on a predefined set of deliverables.?

Agile EPICS are a helpful way to organize your work and to create a hierarchy. The idea is to break work down into shippable pieces so that large projects can get done.?

STORIES are requests written from the perspective of the end user.?

EPICS allow you to deliver on what matters to the customer by ticking off tangible tasks, i.e. STORIES, and SPRINTS allow you to focus on one area at a time, in a set timeframe.?

Note: Atlassian has some super cool and accessible content here

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Having covered all that, it almost doesn't matter whether you think in epics, stories, or sprints.?

What you need to be able to do is to show that you have a handle on all the pieces: That you’re undertaking the process within the context of both the sprint and the epic.?

Imagine if we saw working style, location strategy, diversity, skills development, and mobility all as component parts of one big Workforce Resilience epic??

For example, if you know a job can be done anywhere [Sprint 1], you might consider different geographies to find talent [Sprint 2], and that talent may be a more diverse talent pool, both in terms of their tangible demographics but also in their skills, capability, and mindsets [Sprints 3, 4 and maybe 5?). ?

After this process, you could see Mobility [Sprint 6] as the process of moving people around as you now understand how flexible your talent is to drive a particular outcome.?

That could seem unrealistic, but it’s entirely how Football/Soccer, Baseball and Rugby teams - or many team sports - manages their “assets”, which also happen to be their talent.

Measuring Resilience:

When considering transformation, the other way to help make big things more consumable is to measure them. Both at the outset and an ongoing basis.

?“What’s measured, is improved” Is Peter Drucker's most oft used quote and can only be trumped in frequency by Darwin's quote about adapting to change.

Financial metrics are obviously easy to measure, but how then do we measure areas that have intangible value?

I mentioned Aon’s framework in my last post around building resilience, agility and belonging.

The following 12 segments are levers that we use to measure companies on when assessing their workforce resilience.

?These 12 segments can be applicable and relevant to the bouncing back/forward and can build enough engagement across employees to enable repetition - because that’s the objective of workforce resilience.

I acknowledge they are not exhaustive but it's a start. Each segment of the “clock" has an attributed number of metrics, and in all instances, we already track these – we just may not combine them in the same way.

Using the above example: Assessing “adaptability” would involve analyzing metrics such as a firms’ staff turnover, their new joiners and leavers. We would also consider people mobility metrics such as: career promotion, movement between jobs and across geography, and we would analyze tenure and number of managerial layers within a company.

We benchmark these metrics with the premise that firm culture, understanding or awareness, and the ability to navigate across a firm may be influenced by the metrics mentioned above, and in aggregate will influence a firm’s adaptability.

Using a benchmark provides a simple gap analysis to identify areas to improve, and when you boil it down to the metrics it also makes the "fixes" more solve-able.

If you have a higher turnover, that turnover will have a cost attributed to it; fixing turnover issues therefore saves you money providing a clear Return on Investment on the effort. Even better, when you consider the actions taken to fix the issue, (maybe sprints on defining employee value, career transparency, total rewards, well-being etc.), it starts to provide clarity on a Return-on-Value basis as well.

It’s also important to note that while you help to fix adaptability, the fixes themselves may also help improve financial well-being, healthy behaviors, optimization of people spend, and so on, building towards your Workforce Resilience Epic.

I acknowledge it’s not a silver bullet, but it is entirely feasible, informed, and while yes there is nuance – it builds momentum for delivering a big initiative such as Workforce Resilience.

For more insight read?Aon’s Workforce Resilience Brief.?Alternatively, if you’re curious about what you can do today, find out more on Aon’s?website.