Workforce resilience arguably includes three aspects; protection, durability and healing. This article examines the middle one, durability (wear and tear) in more detail. 

Emergency services teams and the military are great HR examples of team resiliency under a range of unexpected, or unplanned operating conditions. The team is tested, sometimes to breaking point. They rely on every tool they have available to stay durable and stay resilient. Some of the things that support their durability include: structure/discipline, self confidence, training, supply line support, professional tools, expert communications and close teamwork.

But what about durability approaches in other workplaces? Can they imitate good practice, to boost the durability aspect of workforce resilience?  Under testing conditions, team members look to the leader for guidance. The leader doesn’t always have to be their direct line manager, but a ‘chain of command’ responsibility is needed to protect the team and the organisation too. A leader can frame the problem, assign tasks, obtain authority to act, monitor progress and enable the best plan to be executed. A question at this point. Does your workplace culture encourage and enable leaders to step forward at the right times?

Engineers are especially good at understanding durability. They understand requirements, resource limitations, lubricants, catalysts and design principles. Many organisations may not have teams of traditional engineers on the payroll, but are starting to utilise a new breed of engineers: Cloud engineers, data scientists, business process re-engineers, coders and change managers. Perhaps view your engineers in a new light – an important solution to the durability aspect of workforce resilience?

Durability covers both wear and tear. Generally speaking, if enough resources are on hand to cope with fluctuating demand, the risk of ‘tear’ is less. If contracts are in place with suppliers to support your organisation during periods of peak demand, that will lessen the risk of tear too. A more brutal approach is the opposite – pushing the existing resources until you discover their limits. Olympic coaches train and test ambitious athletes, to filter out all but the most talented ones. The NHS seems to by default, also be taking this push resources approach. A question: how much of ‘the great resignation’ is an employee response to unremitting push?

Apart from avoiding ‘tear’, what else can you do to influence ‘wear’? Engineers don’t just source strong components. They also use synthetic or oil-based lubricants (and ball bearings) to reduce friction and increase performance. In a business setting, lubricants might include; facilitators, mediators, mentors, counsellors and brokers. The ‘lubricants’ goal isn’t to achieve groupthink (a diversity of views, as with diverse gene pools enables survival under a wider range of environmental circumstances) but instead, to achieve general harmony for coordinated action and prolonged work life.

Resilience 

When facilities managers arrange planned preventative maintenance (to prolong wear), it is partly to avoid reactive maintenance (sudden tear). In a workforce management setting, annual leave and training are similar examples of preventative maintenance. In contrast, sick leave and employee assistance programmes are repairs and reactive maintenance. 

I once worked in a senior leader role, at a state-funded secondary school, with long overdue classroom windows and roof replacements needed. Teachers resorted to putting plastic rubbish bins beneath holes in the roof when it rained. Students wore their coats inside the classroom during winter, because the classroom windows weren’t weatherproof. The point to make is that people adapted to complete their education lessons. They weathered the storms and stayed focus on the key goals. That’s durability resilience. The story had a happy ending. I got the capital funding to get the roofs and windows replaced before the building fabric dissolved and collapsed completely.

A further story about making adaptations to increase durability resilience. Long ago, I had an old manual-drive car. Myself and my wife decided on a holiday road trip to drive into the remote back-blocks (New Zealand again) and visit an old gold mining ghost town. We had no mobile phone with us. The visit went fine, but driving back down the hill road to take us back to the main road, I noticed the car’s clutch had stopped working.  The car was in second gear at the time and the nearest town (with a garage) was a mere five miles away. My wife and I decided to drive the car in second gear at a slow speed to the nearby town. The problem arose when we hit the main road with cars travelling much faster along the winding highway. They would zoom up behind us and swerve around us because of our slow speed. Suddenly a police car appeared in the rear vision mirror, blue lights flashing. Rather than stop, I slowed down, my wife jumped out and waiting for the police car behind to pick her up and explain the situation. I kept driving, inching ever closer to the town. Eventually the police car passed me and dropped her a bit further up the road to wait for me to catch up. The police car then sped off and I slowed down enough for my wife to jump in the car. We limped into town and went to the neared garage to arrange repairs.  The message from the story is that to prolong the performance of your resources, sometimes you have to think on your feet, form a plan and be creative. Scale back the (engine) wear just long enough until a repairs service becomes available, so the healing part of your resource resilience can start.

Lastly, sometimes fate hands you a duty of care to help a stranger and create some resilience for them. I was once skiing in the New Zealand mountains and came to the final downhill run of the day. The sun had already dipped behind the mountain and the slope was starting to harden up. My ski partner quickly skied off into the distance. I took my time and curiosity made me take a slightly different route down the mountain. I soon discovered bits of ski gear along the way – a ski pole, a glove and then another ski pole. I gathered them up as I went, intending to hand them back, to save the owner the task of trudging up the slope to get them. I turned a corner and came across a ten year old kid standing alone. I gave everything back and noticed as he started to ski away from me, that he was a complete novice, unable to properly control his skis, way up high on a part of the mountain where it wasn’t safe. No sight of the professional ski patrol staff, or even any other skiers. I took off my skis and choose a safe route for us to walk together down the mountain to safety. On the walk down, we chatted enough that he cheered up and regained his confidence. We reached the base and I handed his care across to the ski patrol staff, for them to set about finding the child’s parents. How does this story relate to resilience? The protection and healing rate aspects aren’t so relevant, but my intervention meant only wear and no tear. I was the boy’s instant support team and he probably skis to this day and hopefully helps others in trouble, paying it forward, as they say. In the workplace, as managers, we have a similar duty of care to minimise workforce tear using adaptations when needed.

Simon Leicester

SME Consultant