What is organizational resilience?
Organizational resilience is a critical concept for businesses, especially mid-size to large companies with sizable workforces. It is defined as an organization’s ability to continue functioning at a high level in the face of sudden, unexpected disruptions and gradual changes. Strategic planning experts emphasize the importance of organizational resilience as a critical component of a sound business continuity plan.
While organizational resilience planning can cover dramatic, high-profile disruptive events like natural disasters, extreme weather, terrorist attacks, and military assaults, its everyday applications are far more mundane. Businesses seek to address common problems like severe traffic congestion, unexpected interruptions to public transit service, accidents, and road closures.
Such occurrences tend to have a shorter-term but still financially significant impact on a company’s operations. As such, businesses seek to improve their resilience to insulate themselves from the financial losses caused by disruptions. Sound organizational resilience plans feature four central components:
- Anticipation. Strategic planners assess the various short-term, medium-term, and long-term possibilities when considering the different scenarios that could cause enough disruption to negatively impact business activities.
- Preparation. Companies form and implement contingency plans that address each of the major potential problems identified in the previous step. They also make sure that all management-level staff knows about these contingency plans and can access them on short notice.
- Response. This aspect of the strategy defines the decisive action the company takes to execute its contingency plans. Response elements focus on restoring the organization to acceptable levels of output and productivity as quickly as possible.
- Adaptation. If the disruptive event forces sustained or permanent changes to organizational operation, adaptation plans anticipate the new future landscape while addressing shortcomings with the added benefits of experience and hindsight.
Smart commuting tools improve organizational resilience by preparing you for the unexpected.
One important way to improve organizational resilience is to arm commuters with tools that help them overcome disruptions like inclement weather, transit strikes and service interruptions, construction, and temporary road closures. Common scenarios include things like:
- Problems with train tracks, signals, or other infrastructure that temporarily slows or disables light rail trains, subways, or buses
- Heavy rain or snowfall that causes treacherous driving conditions
- Lane or road closures on major thoroughfares during construction season
Here’s a look at a few specific commuter management strategies that support higher levels of organizational resilience:
- Telecommuting. One of the best ways to overcome disruptions that prevent people from getting to work is to have them work from home instead! Telework commuter services keep employees productive no matter what the weather or local traffic conditions, all while delivering a more beneficial work-life balance that increases job satisfaction.
- Encouraging carpooling. Creating a ridesharing culture in your company encourages people to be less dependent on solo driving. Companies with a high percentage of solo-drive commuters are more susceptible to the problems caused by sudden disruptions. Corporate carpool programs can help: they get people traveling in groups, helping them reach the work site in larger numbers during periods of disruption.
- Vanpools. This effective solution is an excellent workaround for the so-called “last mile” dilemma. Operating a vanpool shuttle between your work site and a major local transit hub allows people to easily use public transportation as an alternative to driving. This can neutralize problems like road closures and severe congestion, giving commuters a point-to-point option that allows them to bypass road problems using subways or overground rail transit.
Giving commuters the ability to take such interruptions in stride and source alternative modes of transportation without missing a beat is critical, and it’s one of the key value propositions offered by the RideAmigos commuter management hub.
The RideAmigos platform has been adopted by numerous businesses and agencies around the world to help improve organizational resilience while reducing their carbon footprints. Get started today and empower your employees to respond to challenges with agility and efficiency.