A key part of building resilience in the hybrid world and workplace is to ensure as many people in the organisation as possible are aware of and take some responsibility for business continuity. This can only be achieved if you have an effective way of embedding business continuity throughout the organisation. The new hybrid world provides us with the opportunity to do this in a way that wasn’t previously possible. If, for example, your organisation had run a short town hall regarding business continuity, pre-pandemic, you would have expected employees to attend in person. The presenter, also there in person, would then inform everyone about the latest updates and news regarding business continuity at the organisation. People who weren’t onsite – for whatever reason - would miss the meeting and therefore miss the information.
However, the hybrid world has changed this. It’s now easier than ever to share BCM information through the use of short virtual live meetings which can also be recorded and shared with the organization. Alternatively, you can set up a virtual / hybrid town hall, or have monthly breakfast briefings whereby your team or the entire organisation can tune in and start their working day with the latest activity and updates regarding BCM at the organisation.
This can be taken one step further by providing what we call spotlight exercises. These are deliberately high level and light touch but allow for some interactivity around current threats and hazards for the coming months. Asking simple questions using readily available online tools or the chat function of your BCM software can easily illicit thoughts and responses on how people and the organization should prepare and respond and what the current considerations and focus areas are.
These spotlight exercises are a great way to encourage people to show a new interest in business continuity and they can be great fun too. One added benefit of this approach is that the output of such sessions can be used to great effect in more formal exercises with key stakeholders. As such, they can help to shape the scenario for an exercise by allowing you to understand how emerging threats and hazards may affect the different areas of your business. This is highly valuable information, so having a way of storing and filtering your spotlight Q&As is a real benefit.
In summary, the hybrid world has given us a new opportunity to bring people together from across the organisation, and engage them in BCM. Additionally, we can now conduct exercising that can build the BCM capabilities of staff at every level, in a way that wasn’t possible previously. Digital tools and the hybrid world can help our organizations be more resilient.
Learn more about how 4C Strategies, with our vast experience and expertise, help organisations build; verify and track their business continuity capabilities.
