As companies continue to navigate macroeconomic uncertainties, they’re increasingly focused on how to build a plan that makes their organization resilient. In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the critical challenges organizations face today — like financial stress, artificial intelligence (AI), and doing more with less — and how they can prepare their workforce for what comes next.
In brief:
- Building organizational resilience is critical: Most companies are adapting workforce strategies to combat disruption, ensuring their ongoing financial health and competitive advantage.
- There are three pillars of resilience: operational agility, leadership and culture that promotes innovation, and employee-first experiences with hybrid work and growth opportunities.
- Replacing employees costs $75,000 to $100,000 each, making workforce resilience financially critical.
- Phased resilience implementation works. Diagnose gaps, align with leadership, pilot with resilience teams, then scale across your organization.
During one of the most disruptive events in recent history, the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 6.2 million people were unable to work in June 2021 alone.
The reason? Their organizations lacked the resilience needed to adapt to the pandemic’s effects.
Organizational resilience is a company’s ability to anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to changes and disruptions. As companies continue to navigate macroeconomic uncertainties, they’re increasingly focused on how to build a plan that makes their organization resilient.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 says 85 percent of employers plan to upskill, 70 percent aim to hire workers with emerging skills, and 51 percent intend to transition existing employees into growing roles. This indicates that most companies are actively adapting workforce strategies to respond to economic and technological pressures.
The most forward-thinking companies are investing in ways to stay agile, aligned and people-centered. Think: hybrid work strategies, leadership coaching, and org design. By weaving these elements together, organizations can create a more connected employee experience while preparing for what’s next.
While a worldwide event like the COVID-19 pandemic may seem like an anomaly, its effect on the business world underscores the importance of organizational resilience. Disruptive events don’t have to be global catastrophes to take a company by surprise.
When crises do hit, resiliency is crucial. In reality, however, resiliency begins long before a disruption hits the headlines. By identifying the challenges that threaten resilience and devising a resiliency-building strategy, organizations can prepare to handle a vast range of business challenges.
Why Organizational Resilience Is a Business Imperative
Since change is inevitable, building resilience should be a core part of an organization’s strategy. However, many organizations are so focused on here-and-now challenges that they lack the bandwidth to weave resiliency into their corporate DNA.
However, staying the course is usually a mistake when disruption arises. For example, you may inadvertently sacrifice:
- Financial Health. A lack of resilience when prices rise or supply chains break, for instance, can result in huge spikes in your cost of goods sold (COGS) and negatively affect profit margins.
- Innovation. A resilient organization can build novel solutions to address challenges because innovation is ingrained in its culture. Without the ability to create and pivot, it’s easy to lose your competitive advantage, especially when your contemporaries can create with agility.
- The Long-Term Value of Your Organization. An organization that can predict and respond to changes insulates itself from the effects of disruption. On the other hand, an entity without resilience is at the mercy of any event that impacts its sphere, which can negate its value in the eyes of investors.
To illustrate, the LEGO company has weathered several storms over the years. When the company was founded in the 1930s, they originally made wooden toys, but a fire in 1942 destroyed one of their factories, almost shutting down the business.
After World War II, the sudden popularity of plastics challenged the wooden toy business. LEGO pivoted to plastic bricks with their first plastic brick in 1949 and patented their signature interlocking brick toy in 1958. The simple toy caught on and was named the Toy of the Century in 2000. By 2003, the company was floundering under $800 million in debt and on the verge of bankruptcy.
Yet LEGO is alive and thriving today. In 2015, LEGO overtook Mattel as the world’s largest toy company and brings in billions of dollars in sales. The company’s resiliency stems from a people- and customer-first focus and eagerness to innovate and adapt to changing needs. Even a giant like LEGO faces a variety of challenges—the same obstacles to resilience faced by smaller companies across all industries.
The Challenges Threatening Organizational Resilience Today
Whether you’re a small manufacturer or a global software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, you likely face the same challenges to organizational resiliency:
Uncertainty
Economic pressures from rising prices make building reliable budgets difficult. Even when expenses are relatively controlled, shifts in regulations can force you to develop new policies to avoid fines or production interruptions.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is also introducing uncertainty because, in many industries, organizations are racing to use the exciting technology to its fullest potential as soon as possible. Those without an effective AI adoption strategy may risk falling behind AI-enabled competitors.
Doing More With Less
Budget cuts can affect everyone in the organization. Teams have to run leaner, which leads to overworked employees burdened with new responsibilities. The resulting stress can spark high employee turnover rates and bring down morale.
When employees leave, it’s easy to overlook the financial impact on the organization. On average, it costs an employer $75,000 to $100,000 to replace an individual contributor. Thus, the impact of doing more with less extends beyond employee morale — it also affects the organization’s finances.
Fortunately, there’s no reason to let these challenges stymie your organizational resilience strategy. By taking a systematic approach to building operational agility, culture, and positive employee experiences, you can incorporate resiliency into the foundation of your business.
3 Pillars of Building Organizational Resilience
These three pillars can support any resiliency initiative, regardless of the industry.
1. Operational Agility
A company with operational agility designs processes that flex with market shifts. For example, if the cost of hiring local employees gets too high, an agile organization can implement smooth, simple onboarding processes for remote workers without excessively disrupting operations.
While operational agility often hinges on technology and processes, it’s equally important to focus on employee experiences.
Centric Consulting’s Mark Paulson explains it this way: “Whatever the change is to the process, technology, or experience, companies must have the customer and employee in mind and design their experiences in such a way that promises to leave them feeling happiness and/or joy with their experience.”
By following this advice, you create an emotionally resilient organization, rather than one that merely maintains production levels when faced with change.
2. Leadership and Culture
Building organizational resilience begins with leadership, which sets the tone for all companywide initiatives. However, you can’t presume that a domino effect will naturally follow simply because the C-suite is ready for resiliency improvements. A resilient workforce needs explicit coaching around being resilient because employees may feel that coping with change just means “working harder.”
Instead, your culture should support the idea of working smarter. Working smarter involves fostering psychological safety for employees who come up with new ideas. New ideas should be welcomed, and you need a zero-shaming policy for those trying to develop innovative approaches.
There’s a direct line between an innovation-first culture and organizational success: The most effective organizations align their culture, processes, and policies to cultivate continuous innovation. This drives top-line growth and bottom-line efficiency.
3. Employee Experience and Connection
An employee-first strategy prioritizes employees’ experiences and preferences even if it means considering them over those of managers and executives. It can be jarring at first, but you have some tactics for keeping employees happy and ready to manage changes:
- Use hybrid work strategies that promote inclusion and engagement. Let those working remotely lead meetings and set up collaborative work around their schedules while you constantly ask for their feedback and input.
- Use tools and routines that encourage cross-team cohesion. You can build cross-functional groups in collaboration software like Microsoft Teams, for example, that bring diverse voices to the table. When building resiliency strategies, unite people from different departments so they can all circle around the same challenges.
- Openly advertise opportunities for growth and upskilling through organizational resilience training. In private and public meetings, as well as in organizational newsletters and intranets, prioritize growth and upskilling opportunities. Your employees should never feel stuck or stagnant.
A workforce that’s ready to adapt takes much of the stress off the change experience. You can worry less about employees leaving or crumbling under the pressure of a new initiative and focus instead on fine-tuning your adjustment strategy. Start building your strategy with just these three components.
3 Strategies for Strengthening Workforce Resilience
A resilient workforce comprises professionals with the skills and attitude necessary for agility. Keep these things in mind while boosting the resiliency of your workforce:
- Provide comprehensive resiliency training. This involves more than just soft skills. Employees need to know how to use resources that enhance their capabilities as well, such as AI tools and collaboration apps.
- Know how to manage risk and uncertainty in organizational change. Prepare teams for disruption by outlining the challenges that may impact your company. Putting these on their radar prompts them to think about ways to adapt when a change occurs.
- Conduct regular pulse checks. You must be able to measure employee adaptability, which could involve evaluating their comfort level with new technologies and whether they feel supported as innovators.
Putting It Into Practice: Your Road Map to Resilience
Your road map to resilience consists of a phased approach, one that starts at the managerial level and eventually onboards most, if not all, of your organization:
1. Diagnose Current Gaps
You may need to address resiliency gaps in areas such as supply chain flexibility, economic fragility, cybersecurity, and maintaining a competitive advantage, among others, to mitigate potential weaknesses.
2. Cocreate Priorities With Leadership
With your list of gaps in hand, approach leadership and decide which gaps to address, when, and how. Gaps regarding security and market position may take priority over procedural concerns.
3. Pilot and Train Teams
Your resiliency teams are more than just think tanks that spawn great ideas. Some team members may be responsible for training resiliency improvement managers or playing managerial roles themselves.
4. Scale and Iterate
While scaling up, you may encounter some helpful overlap. For instance, building a more resilient network may involve some of the same steps as improving the resilience of your storage and backup systems: both often include establishing redundant systems.
Resilience: More Than a Buzzword
Resilience is a leadership imperative, especially given the challenges of new technology and unpredictable world events. It’s good to make an honest assessment of your company by asking, “How resilient is my organization — really?”
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