👉 Resilience is the new compliance and policy is driving employer preparedness. With a focus on training, companies need to go from policy to practice as organisational resilience is now a business priority
📑 Jon Czul explores how a learning culture will strengthen this, and why it matters in these turbulent times
It’s often said that we live in increasingly turbulent times, and the past few months and years certainly gives credence to that. From Covid and the climate crisis to digital transformation and global trade wars, businesses are constantly having to re-think, re-adjust and re-align in the face of rapid, multifaceted, ‘polycentric’ forms of change.
It is clear that government views skills development and training as being central to our collective efforts to strengthen individual, organisational, community and national resilience
Responding to this growing sense of uncertainty in the UK, a cross-departmental policy agenda has emerged which aims to develop a strategic and co-ordinated approach to bolstering the nation’s resilience through strengthening our collective ability to withstand and recover from a variety of disruptive threats and challenges.
Resilience for security
A cornerstone of this workstream is the UK Government Resilience Framework, which describes how a ‘whole of society approach’ to resilience is crucial for safeguarding social and economic security. The general direction of travel that the Framework points to is one whereby businesses and communities will be expected to play a more active and supportive role in building the UK’s resilience to climate, health and national security threats into the future.
As far as employers are concerned, what is under discussion here does not only refer to an updating or mandating of business continuity plans, for example. A host of regulatory and non-regulatory policy measures are being considered by government to compel and encourage employers to prioritise emergency preparedness and organisational resilience in the years and decades to come.
Staff readiness through training
The most imminent example of how the government’s resilience agenda is beginning to gain traction is Martyn’s Law. Introduced in response to the systemic and organisational failures of the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, Martyn’s Law is designed to strengthen the UK’s resilience to terrorism. Comparable in-scale for businesses to the introduction of GDPR legislation for example, Martyn’s Law requires all manner of public venues, including schools, to institute emergency preparedness plans and train staff in counter terror safety measures.
For many employers, this will be first time that the government’s resilience agenda directly affects their training plans and operations, but likely not the last.
Organisational resilience to and preparedness for civil emergencies are overarching themes of the ongoing UK Covid-19 Inquiry for example, which could mandate similar training requirements to that of Martyn’s Law further down the track. The business community seems to be onboard with the message too, what with the CBI recently calling on government to invest and support UK PLC to “embed resilience at the core of their operations”.
Said developments come off the back of Cabinet Office’s review of the civil contingences suite of National Occupational Standards (NOS) and the launch of the UK Resilience Academy (UKRA) late last year.
NOS describe the knowledge and skills required to undertake a particular job role to a recognised level of competence. With a focus on organisational resilience, the updated NOS provides a toolkit to facilitate job role and learning design in support of capabilities and capacity-building in this area. By way of comparison, the UKRA has been established as a centre of excellence to support employers to train their staff in resilient governance and risk management practices.
Training focus
It is clear that government views skills development and training as being central to our collective efforts to strengthen individual, organisational, community and national resilience. L&D practitioners can therefore expect to play a crucial role in supporting the implementation of measures to strengthen organisational resilience in the near future.
Beyond the potential regulatory training requirements that the resilience agenda promises however, why should organisations begin to prioritise resilience in the way that government appears to?
At a basic level, there is a clear strategic advantage to being able to learn and respond quickly to expected and unexpected external events. We need look no further than the pandemic for an object lesson in why businesses need to be able to learn quickly and adapt to changes in their external environment. Moreover, there is an inherent interconnectedness between organisational resilience and organisations that prioritise learning, as proponents of the ’learning organisation’ contend.
Further evidence suggests that resilience is something that can be learned effectively within organisations. Learning at a group, team and individual level has also been identified as a ‘critical driver’ for building organisational resilience to disruption resulting from expected and unexpected threats and challenges.
Whilst the future is inherently difficult to predict, we can say with a degree of certainty that the turbulent times we have become accustomed to are here to stay. The resilience policy agenda serves as a bellwether in this regard, and so developments in this space, I would suggest, are something that L&D practitioners should continue to pay close attention to.
Jon Czul is Managing Director – Consultancy and Research at The Workforce Development Trust
