Most organisations are running their annual or even monthly engagement surveys. A regular temperature check on whether your employees want to stay with you, what they say about the organisation, and whether they are prepared to go the extra mile to see it succeed, provide valuable indicators for performance. However, many of the items included in engagement surveys do not deliver any actionable information and neglect measuring organisational resilience and its ability to withstand “shocks”, qualities of increasing importance in today’s volatile world. There are two dimensions to consider, what is actually in place to address resilience and also what is perceived. The latter is ever more important as we head full-on into The Great Resignation. Employee confidence in organisational capabilities and longevity becomes more critical to address.
We propose to review your current survey instrument replacing some of the items that are adding less value and capture insights to develop an organisational resilience map across your organisation instead. It will provide a baseline to gain insight into this increasingly crucial ability for businesses to successfully ride the waves of today’s volatile environment. Regular measurement will demonstrate progress on becoming a more resilient organisation and build your internal business case for further investments to enhance resilience over time.
An established scale to measure the concept has not yet emerged but Kantur and Iseri-Say offer a pragmatic 12-item scale as a starting point. Their study identified three dimensions which they label Robustness, Agility, and Integrity. The latter comprises two items that we would prefer to describe as a collaboration that is closely related to engagement. Whilst the study has not been extensive and ongoing work will add to its refinement, the items appear suitable to blend into most engagement-type surveys. Lee et al. (2015) have approached the subject from the angle of ‘High-Reliability Organisations (HROs)’ studying a range of interrelated concepts which they reduced to 15 items classified in two factors, firstly ‘adaptive capacity’ and secondly, ‘planning ability’ as key umbrella measures of organisational resilience. Their work appears particularly suitable for a more comprehensive audit of related indicators.
Developing a Tool to Measure and Compare Organizations’ Resilience (researchgate.net)
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