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Operational Resilience: Enhance Your Business Despite Increasing Threats

According to the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK, operational resilience is the ability of an organisation, financial establishments, or the overall financial industry to stop, adapt, learn, or respond to operational disruptions.

While all businesses take measures to face any emergency, the management must monitor the situation to ensure that these emergency plans are relevant and effective against the growing number of critical events.

The 2020-2021 Major Incident Management report states that an emergency preparedness plan is not sufficient to counter the ever-growing number of threats. Organisations must now invest in operational resilience plans to fill this gap.

What is Operational Resilience?

Operational resilience is best defined as a series of processes, techniques, and initiatives a business establishment undertakes to ensure business continuity during disruptive situations. 

Proper operational resilience in an organisation ensures that it faces fewer disruptions and will be prepared for future threats. Implementing appropriate operational resilience plans ensures that the desired results are delivered in shorter periods and with fast response times.

Establishing a mature business is challenging and requires multiple strategies and approaches that usually begin with a proper operational resilience plan.

Why is Operational Resilience Crucial for All Businesses and Organizations?

The value of operational resilience is measured in two aspects:

  • The safety of employees
  • Offering protection to crucial business functions

How Does Operational Resilience Bring Employee Safety?

A company’s staff is its backbone, and management must ensure they are protected at all costs. Ensuring employee safety is not essential for business compliance but is also a moral decision.

The best way to ensure employee safety is to keep a comprehensive operational resilience plan in place to deal with critical events – especially the ones that can put lives at risk.

For instance, if your office is in an earthquake-prone area, you are well aware of the constant environmental risks surrounding your business. So, ensuring that your employees are protected from earthquake aftershocks and falling objects is the best operational resilience to undertake in this scenario. 

How Does Operational Resilience Protect Business Critical Functions?

Operational resilience protects the employees and ensures the safety of critical data, business assets, and processes from getting destroyed or damaged. Without proper operational resilience, such disruptions can result in indefinite downtime costing the organisation millions of pounds. 

Regardless of the importance of operational resilience in an organisation, it can take time for the management to detect exactly where the plan needs to be implemented. 

To recognize the areas that need operational resilience plans, it is essential to monitor the businesses’ resiliency regularly and get the proper certifications.

How is Operational Resilience Measured in Terms of Critical Events?

Once you can accurately measure organisational resilience, developing an operational resilience strategy becomes quite easy. Organisational resilience is detecting, preparing, and resolving business disruptions while countering the impact on safety, life, operation, and reputation.

Once you measure organisational resilience properly, you can create the most efficient and effective strategies for critical events and situations. Some of these critical events include:

  • Terror attacks
  • Cyberattacks
  • Natural disasters
  • IT failure or business system failure

Your management can identify and evaluate the following factors to measure organisational resilience:

  • Employee and personnel safety in and around the workplace
  • Smooth maintenance of operational uptime and business continuity
  • Optimising supply chain processes and routes.
  • Ensuring the safety of smart architecture 
  • Building and maintaining a responsive and resilient IT system

While these evaluations can be carried out internally, you can also outsource the work to experts and listen to their recommendations and suggestions for comprehensive operational resilience plans.

In Conclusion

The modern marketplace is dynamic and everchanging, making resilience an important factor contributing to the growth and success of an organisation. From unbridled technological advancement to climate, these factors make the global marketplace quite unpredictable.

An organisation’s operational resilience is also a factor that indicates its success or failure, in addition to its performance. Resilience is not only about preventing risks but also a competitive opportunity for you to stay ahead of other businesses in the marketplace.

While high performance is an important and common factor that indicates organisational success, sustained and consistent performance wins the race. And this can only be achieved with a proper operational resilience plan in place.