Business Resilience Planning: 5 Must-Knows

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Business resilience planning could make or break your organization. Start preparing for it now and keep the following ideas in mind.

Economic volatility and business uncertainty are the order of the day around the world today. The subsequent business cycles only favor companies that build up measures of business resilience and agility in their core areas.

That’s why companies must understand business resilience and learn how to incorporate it into their long-term planning efforts. Business resilience is the ability to rapidly and inexpensively adapt and respond to business, industry, or financial disruptions while maintaining continuous operations.

Flexibility Is the Key to Business Resilience Planning

Knowing how much an organization can bend before it breaks is crucial when planning for business resilience. Therefore, determine the essential functions and prioritize what would be critical in times of distress. For example, secure mission-critical and time-sensitive business functions because they’re the least flexible.

Knowing what an organization can minimize during a crisis is essential. Establish an acceptable minimum level of operations to make business resilience planning more effective. Understanding your organization’s vulnerabilities are could help you prepare for staying in business during a disaster. Overall, it would help yours to become a more resilient organization.

Facility Managers Play a Crucial Role

Facility management (FM) is an organizational function that integrates and supports people, places, and processes. It ensures their functionality, comfort, sustainability, safety, and efficiency. According to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), FM’s primary purpose is to improve the quality of people’s lives and ensure core business productivity.

The people who work in FM are called facility managers. These people play a unique role in business resilience planning. Specifically, they help organizations create workplace environments that help sustain the mission. They ensure that systems work together seamlessly and the business continues when disruptive events occur.

Moreover, facility managers are considered the facilitators of business resilience. They prepare the workforce and the facilities with sufficient preparation, resources, and processes to reestablish business-as-usual as quickly and safely as possible.

Natural Disasters Aren’t the Top Threat

While naturally occurring and weather-related events are something to address, they aren’t the most concerning threats to business operations. According to building owners, risk managers, and building operators, here are the top threats to business operations in 2022:

IT disruption
Theft and fraud
Talent risks
Geopolitical risks
Information security
Resilience risks
Third-party risks
Conduct risks
Climate risks
Regulatory risks

Despite being the most concerning threats to daily business operations, the disastrous events listed above are often less understood and overlooked in business resilience planning. To better know which of these threats your organization is most susceptible to, it’s crucial to be aware of just how critical each individual worker’s operations are.

A formal risk assessment can help you better understand your specific business risks. You will also gain understanding of the associated threats and discover what your business has to do to become more resilient. The objective of a formal risk assessment is to identify risk treatments that could reduce the likelihood or severity of any disruption.

It is important to remember that these disruptions come with costs. You should prepare to cover for those costs, too.

For example, if your business faces an emergency and you don’t have enough funding for it, you must have other sources as a backup. This includes arranging for a loan from banks and online lenders like CreditNinja.

A risk assessment also helps organizations understand the effectiveness of existing risk controls. This makes it one of the most effective methods of prioritizing your business resilience planning efforts.

Business Continuity Plans Are a Must

When it comes to natural disasters, most businesses focus only on emergency preparedness. However, these plans are not enough. It’s essential to have strategies for resuming business operations efficiently after any significant disruption.

When planning for business resilience, a business continuity plan is a must, together with an emergency response plan. This is the cornerstone of effective planning efforts and can frame your organization’s 3Rs: the ability to respond, resume, and recover.

A business continuity plan has to incorporate at least the following five key elements:

Risks and their potential business effects
Plans for an effective response
Roles and responsibilities
Communication
Testing and training

Every company structures business continuity plans differently. However, they should all meet the needs of foreseen and unforeseen business disruptions. An effective business continuity plan keeps customer dissatisfaction at bay, boosts team confidence, and shortens recovery times.

Business Resilience Planning Is Inexpensive

While establishing an effective business resilience plan requires some expenditures, spending doesn’t have to be exorbitant.

It is important to remember that the costs of disaster mitigation are often measured in employee hours. Moreover, the opportunity costs of not planning far outweigh them.

Downtimes are costly to all organizations regardless of size. Even worse, their effects extend into the future since they can cause your organization take more time to resume business-as-usual than you can afford. Without a business resilience plan, recovery will take longer and be costlier.

Further, business resilience planning has a positive financial effect. Although the threats may have a low probability, business resilience planning efforts can help identify their aftermath. Then you can implement a plan to reduce their costs.

The return on investment with this plan is almost immediate if you stop to consider the potential financial damages your brand could suffer without such planning.

Final Thoughts

Effective business resilience planning isn’t just for mitigating the effects of a business disruption. Minimizing any risk decreases the potential negative productivity and the financial consequences of any disruptive event. Ultimately, it also gives customers confidence when they understand that you company’s service is always reliable.