As an HR professional, it’s important to drive resilience in your organization. But it’s hard enough to ensure your own resilience, let alone your organization’s. In fact, you might feel like over the past couple of years you’ve experienced a bit of whiplash! Here’s what we mean. During the pandemic, you had to go through downsizing, layoffs, and business closures. 12 months ago, HR had to hire everyone that you could because the workforce was going through the Great Resignation. Then six months ago, candidates were calling their own shots and demanding Radical Flexibility. And now, we’re going through inflation and soon be facing a recession. It’s enough to make your head spin, and unfortunately you can’t control most of it. But what can you do to put a bit more control into your work life and feel like you’re making a positive impact on your organization? Let’s dig into the topic of resilience a bit deeper.
What Is Resilience?
According to dictionary.com, resilience is the ability of a:
- Person to adjust to or recover readily from illness, adversity, major life changes, etc.
- System or organization to respond to or recover readily from a crisis, disruptive process, etc.
In your HR role since the beginning of 2020, you may have faced your own, or family members’ and friends’, COVID illness. You had to deal with the illness or loss of co-workers. And your business had to cut back on your workforce and even shut down for a while. Those are definitely major life changes.
And, more than likely, your organization had to face the new challenge of handling a different type of workforce crisis, economic disruption, and being forced to quickly adapt to a remote operation.
If you have been able to adjust and recover readily, congratulations, you’re resilient.
If your business has responded and recovered readily, it is resilient.
“Resilience is what you make of the situation, it’s how you lead through it.
It’s the reaction. It’s that pause between action, pause, reaction.
It’s that pause part to say, ‘Who am I going to be?’
before I react and how does it line up with the values and mission of the organization?”
–Anita Grantham, Head of HR, BambooHR
What Can HR Do To Drive Organization Resilience?
Driving resilience in your organization is an ongoing process. As we’ve learned, it requires time and effort. As an HR professional, you can take the lead to ensure your organization is resilient by analyzing these different areas:
- Make recommendations with facts and figures. It’s important to analyze current situations by reviewing your HR data. What is your workforce reality when it comes to your HR metrics and KPIs, such as diversity, headcount, recruiting, retention, turnover, attendance, and performance? When you know the true facts and figures, then your recommendations to fill the gaps and try new ideas overall will make your workforce more resilient.
- Ensure talent management data is tracked. When it comes to managing all the aspects of the employee lifecycle, make sure you’re tracking the success and/or challenges of the following so you can correct the course as needed:
- onboarding new talent
- conducting performance reviews
- setting individual position goals
- providing consistent rewards and recognition
- gathering important feedback in exit interviews
- Identify and prioritize competencies that best support business goals. Of course there are some technical, hard skills required for various roles that are demonstrated with a certificate, degree, or test. But Powers Skills such as emotional intelligence, creativity, adaptability, collaboration, problem-solving, and decision-making are critical for workforce resilience and agility. They are more interpersonal skills.
- Create accurate job descriptions. Turnover is typically higher with new hires. Why? Because their actual job duties and responsibilities don’t match what was listed in the job description. When they experience something different than expected, they quit. It’s okay to let candidates know the good, bad, and the ugly. When you have a stable workforce of talent that wants to be at your organization, and understands the downsides of their positions, you will have more resilience as an organization.
- Strengthen employee retention efforts. Identify the top performers in your organization. These are the people you want to keep. Make sure you listen to their challenges and offer solutions. Provide mentoring, training, and career advancement opportunities. Offer accommodation for personal challenges. Train your managers to communicate effectively and support their teams well.
How Can HR Leaders Ensure Their Team’s Resilience?
While you’re driving resilience across your organization, don’t forget to ensure you’re building resilience in your HR Team. Your team has a lot on their plate. Employees turn to your team when they need support. Managers rely on your team for guidance. Leadership expects your team to do more with pulling HR data, reporting, and doing more with less. If your HR team gets too much piled on, they could feel overwhelmed.
As an HR leader, it’s important to:
- Establish boundaries for your team and let the organization know what your team is and is not responsible for.
- Build your HR strategy to be aligned with your organization’s goals and objectives.
- Communicate the impact of your HR Team’s impact on the organization’s bottom line and importance to the mission.
- Implement processes and provide necessary equipment/software to ensure your team is working efficiently.
- Rely on HR data to guide your team’s initiatives and how they impact the workforce.
- Gather feedback from your HR team on a regular basis so you know what their needs are, if the systems and processes are working well, and find out ideas to improve the efficiency of the team.
How Can HR Data Drive Organizational Resilience?
It’s important to be able to gather and analyze HR data efficiently and quickly run reports. Tap into data and reports with technology that empowers your HR team and helps leaders make data-driven decisions. HR data and analytics play a huge part in helping your organization become more agile and resilient. With the right technology, Managers and Leadership can be more self-sufficient and access the reports they need, without relying on the HR team. That frees up your team to focus on alignment with your organization’s strategy and developing the initiatives that will help your workforce reach business goals.
Employee Cycle helps your HR team engage with your organization like never before with an HR dashboard that helps you see real metrics in real-time that really matter. Learn how you can view all of your HR data in minutes, and help your organization make data-driven decisions. We can show you how to drive resilience in your organization with HR data providing:
- Integration with your current HR systems
- Metrics and KPIs
- Reporting and analytics
- Data coaching
- Customization
- Security
Request a demo today and we’ll even provide a 14-day trial for you to check out Employee Cycle.
