Lifting our personal and organisational resilience

For each of us personally, and for most of our organisations, the last two ‘pandemic years’ have thrown us a series of curve balls that were unexpected to say the least, taking us out of our comfort zones both at home and at work. The unpredictable events brought challenges that were often huge, and on reflection, we have as a society done remarkably well in adjusting. Like most professional consulting firms, my own university closed its campus during lockdowns, and our international students who fund much of our revenue stream were prevented from coming to Australia, while the university sector was excluded from JobKeeper support to boot. At my university, we were creeping slowly towards bringing online teaching into play to supplement face to face traditions, and Bang, we were forced to accomplish a complete transition of a five-year gradual change in under two weeks. Necessity certainly was the mother of invention! Interestingly, student reaction was generally positive, indeed our teaching programs were so successfully transformed that many students do not want to transition back to campus.

The pandemic-induced challenges were big, in terms of technical capability and personally for many of us, whilst we were also under the health cloud of not knowing much at all about how the pandemic would develop. In combination with working from home, many of us also had to do home schooling, change our work-life balance habits, and endure multiple lockdowns, while watching the tragic death count rise.

Human resilience came to the fore

Organisations are ultimately made up of individuals, working in teams and departments, and the resilience of organisations was founded on the resilience of their individual employees, led and guided by the policies and encouragement of those in senior leadership roles. Some people report that their productivity increased during lockdowns.

How we connected socially was very challenging when pubs, clubs and restaurants were closed and events cancelled, and in many states, we couldn’t see even our closest friends and relatives for many weeks at a time. While we all moved quickly and effectively to Zoom and Teams for our work meetings, many of us neglected the longer-term impacts on our mental health, and a learning for ‘next time’ is that society needs to ramp up its support services much more effectively for people who did not adjust well to lockdowns and closed down offices and leisure activities, and even no possibility of holidays in the usual sense. The mental health impact is still a challenge facing our communities.

Business challenges were immense, and they continue. Many retail businesses are closed and never coming back which is tragic for our economy, and even our largest professional service businesses had to reconsider their cash flow forecasts and viability in the new ‘pandemic’ conditions. Ultimately, most professional service firms survived, and some even prospered under the different business conditions that the pandemic imposed on us, which is again a testament to both collective and individual human resilience.

Governments, both Federal and State, were required to show strong societal and economic leadership through the pandemic, and on reflection they deserve about a ‘B- minus’ on their capability to plan and execute responses, with many disastrous decisions and consequences, such as in quarantine management, Aged Care facilities, and in acquiring and distributing vaccines and PPE in a timely way.

"Organisations are ultimately made up of individuals, working in teams and departments, and the resilience of organisations was founded on the resilience of their individual employees, led and guided by the policies and encouragement of those in senior leadership roles.”

Reprioritising our approach to work and life

A key learning for many of us has been to put things into perspective, and ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff’. I have recently helped one large and one smaller organisation create vision statements, strategic plans and business improvement initiatives, and noticed that they were very comfortable to look at the big challenges and, refreshingly, not get bogged down in trivia, knowing that the tactical actions will work out if we can get the big picture framework right. In past years, many such groups I have worked with had a natural tendency to spend too much time ‘in the weeds’, but this seems to have changed: what a good thing! Perhaps what we have all experienced in the pandemic years has given us a valuable new perspective on what is really important.

There was much to learn from what transpired during the pandemic, and indeed we saw elements of human nature come to the fore that surprised many of us, such as violent demonstrations in our capital cities by anti-vaxxers and others, greed driven business owners who rorted JobKeeper and refused to pay it back even when named as rorters, and arrogance by some societal and political leaders. Thankfully we also saw widespread acts of human kindness and caring for people who needed extra support and care during lockdowns.

We were confronted by decisions being made differently around the world concerning trade-offs between lives and livelihoods, and thankfully for us in Australia there was great care and compassion for lives in the most, compared with countries such as Brazil, USA and many others. Australia’s death rate per million of population is quite far down the international ranking list, tragically too high at 200 deaths per million of population, yet it is cold comfort to note that some countries were fifteen times worse, when we also can note that New Zealand was fifteen times better! There is much to learn about quarantine management and governance, vaccines and treatment supply chains, and health care policy from the past two years.

Looking forward on a personal level, we have certainly had time, in between Zoom meeting perhaps, to reflect on our lives, personal and careers, relationships and position on important issues going forward such as climate change mitigation. The challenges that we have all faced into over the past two years can be seen as an opportunity to re-prioritise how we live. On reflection, I’m thankful that this pandemic wasn’t 100 times more contagious and deadly, and hope and expect that our preparedness for the next crisis, be it a pandemic, flood, bushfires, or something else, will build on the collective resilience we have developed.

Danny Samson is Professor of Management at the University of Melbourne. He provides strategic advisory services and conducts management development programs with Consult Australia: comments to d.samson@unimelb.edu.au