I recently ran a client assessment looking at the level of staff resilience within an organisation. I note this is a current theme with the publishing of a new framework by IBM: The Personal Side Of Business Continuity: Addressing Human Capital Management Issues During Crises“.
Anyway, back to my client assessment. I carried out an assessment of the impact of varying levels of absenteeism on client business activities. Thanks to my association with ImpactAware, I was able to carry out the assessment in a matter of minutes against large volumes of real world data.
Although this is only an early assessment the results were of great interest. It would seem that critical functions within an organisation tend to have some form of resilience built in. In the dataset I used, the clients were at the early stages of business continuity planning and so this had no influence on their level of preparedness. So prior to implementing a BCM strategy the clients critical functions were clearly resilient to high levels of absentiesm. Non-critical functions were fragile in the face of absentiesm but that is as it should be. The most sensitive area within the business were those gray areas which were not Critical but were clearly important.
From my assessment of the numbers and my understanding of the context, I would suggest that organisations have a natural level of resilience built in. To answer the question posed by the title of this post: It would seem that your biggest risks may not be in your critical activities as these are well understood, articulated and protected. The risks may vary well be in the gray areas that live just below the waterline.
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