How Resilient Business Strategies Use in the UK

Businesses need resilience to prepare for future challenges. From pandemics and geopolitical conflicts to cybersecurity threats and natural disasters, these events can have long-term effects on company growth.

Resilient companies go beyond business continuity and resumption plans to develop strategies that reduce vulnerability to long-term changes. To implement resilient growth strategies, consider the following critical steps.

Managing Inventory

Resilient companies take a proactive approach to managing inventory and other assets by building redundancy into supply chains. This includes diversifying vendor supply of raw materials. This may increase prices in the short term but enables businesses to withstand disruptions that may cause one supplier to fail.

Proactively Managing Suppliers

Companies should be able to identify critical suppliers through spending data, N-tier mapping and other risk indicators and develop effective mitigation plans. They should also monitor risks from other sources, such as weather forecasts, social unrest, and financial markets.

Resilient companies also reevaluate just-in-time inventory strategies to keep safety stocks on hand or shift from’make to order’ to’make to stock.’ This enables them to continue operations during disruptions and reduces fulfillment delays. It can also lower storage costs and improve supply chain efficiency. However, this requires a significant investment in capital and operating expenditures. This makes it challenging for some leaders to justify the expense.

Developing a Continuity Plan

Amid the recent disasters, cybersecurity incidents, pandemics and economic turmoil, there has been growing interest in resilient business strategies. From minimizing the impact of risk to surviving the shockwave and surging past competitors, business resilience is more important than ever.

To develop a successful business continuity plan, companies must conduct a Business Impact Analysis and Risk Assessment to identify time-sensitive functions, processes and resources that must continue. They must also determine what could disrupt those services and identify ways to maintain operations if those disruptions occur, including training staff, developing recovery strategies, organizing teams and testing activation plans.

To build resiliency, leaders must encourage a culture that embraces flexibility and forethought. This requires a culture shift that challenges an over-fixation on short-term efficiency, backward-looking metrics and misaligned incentives. It also demands a focus on innovation and the ability to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. These leadership changes can help businesses survive and thrive despite challenging times.

Investing in Strategic Technology

A company’s resilience is often linked to its technological capabilities. A resilient organization prioritizes investing in secure and flexible technology stacks that enable business processes and workflows to adapt to rapid shifts in business climates. These strategies enable the business to overcome challenges more effectively, and emerge from crises stronger than before.

Developing and integrating technology across your business also helps to eliminate siloes and create synergy. This enables your team to work together in the face of adversity and makes it easier to collaborate during times of uncertainty.

A resilient business also recognizes that it is part of a larger system, and it can’t succeed in isolation from society. This includes efforts like reducing polarization, optimizing for both societal and business value, and reimagining business models for sustainability. The resiliency movement is creating significant changes to the way businesses operate and how executives measure success. These shifts will ultimately make businesses more attractive to investors, employees, and customers and help them thrive in new, shifting business landscapes.

Developing a Culture of Resilience

Business leaders who view resilience as a core business strategy rather than a mere response to crisis will be better equipped to survive and thrive during disruptions. They will be able to leverage disruptive events as a chance to make long-term changes to business as usual that improve efficiency and competitive advantage.

This requires the organization to foster a resilient culture in addition to building and executing on business continuity and disaster recovery plans. This culture includes promoting the use of agile working models, encouraging employees to develop and maintain strong work-from-home capabilities and fostering an environment that promotes psychological safety (the idea that it is okay to make mistakes or fail) as well as continuous learning and change.

Companies that have a resilient culture may also be more likely to form “tiger teams” of experts from different parts of the business who come together temporarily for specific projects and then return to their regular duties. In this way, these organizations are able to solve problems quickly and effectively.