Ready for future business disruption? 3 key change management areas to assess

More than 70% of your peers are “very” or “extremely” confident in their organization’s ability to quickly handle a variety of business disruptions – including data breaches, labor shortages, supply chain issues, natural disasters and major changes in the competitive landscape.

That’s according to the Ceridian 2022 Executive Survey.

These business leaders may be thinking that if they survived COVID, they can survive anything. However, the survey also reveals that organizations need to be making additional investments to become truly resilient when facing business disruption in the future.

Becoming business-disruption proof

A panel discussion in the Ceridian webinar “Not Quite Disruption-proof: Survey of 2,000 Leaders Reveals Gaps in Workforce Change Readiness” concluded that to navigate business disruptions, employers will need to have a skills development strategy to maintain top talent, enable their workforce to adapt and build a culture of learning.

Panelist Alexandra Levit, a Wall Street Journal columnist, author and consultant, cited research by LinkedIn that indicates the skillset for the average job, regardless of industry, has changed 25% since 2015.

A skills development strategy can involve internal training programs (e.g., reskilling, upskilling or cross-skilling for adapting to evolving job roles), job shadowing and mentorships, promoting highly skilled employees to higher impact roles and/or investing in technology to track skills gaps.

“If they develop their (human) resources, their resources are retained, and they have less cycles of going to the market and paying a competitive dollar or a current market rate dollar,” said panelist Genaro Baez, director of HR operations, learning and development and talent acquisition of Milwaukee County, WI.

Levit recommended starting with a baseline training program toolbox that helps workers develop:

• soft skills (interpersonal communication, emotional intelligence, good judgement)
• hard skills for doing specific jobs
• applied technology skills (training on relevant software to help employees do their jobs proficiently)
• institutional knowledge (how to handle different scenarios on the job), and
• growth and adaptable mindsets.

The value of succession planning

Not having an effective succession plan is risky. What if a pool of your company’s managers wins the lottery and they don’t have to report for work anymore?

Here’s evidence: 68% of survey participants said they were concerned about key roles being unfilled. The survey also found that almost half (43%) of key leadership roles remain vacant for four months or longer. It’s not the kind of situation you’d want if a crisis suddenly strikes your business.

Although most organizations hire external candidates for senior leadership roles (74%), it might be wise to consider taking a skills inventory of your existing talent. “Organizations can benefit from increasing their investment internally to fill those roles faster and minimize disruption,” said the authors of the survey.

Baez added that managers coming from outside the organization are on a learning curve and lack the “native knowledge” of your operations that would be critical to have should a significant business disruption occur.

Levit noted that there are AI-enabled job intelligence software solutions that use algorithms to objectively evaluate relevant skills, experience and attributes among the people within your organization. Eliminating human bias, an internal candidate for leadership succession who would otherwise get overlooked can emerge.

“If somebody has experience, let’s say, in strategic planning, how easy would it be if that person doesn’t currently have the leadership skill of budgeting … to train the person in the budgeting skill so that they have their full suite of capabilities that they need to become a leader?” she said.

DEI & change readiness

Almost half (46%) of survey respondents reported that they implemented Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) strategies specifically to be ready for change. More than a third (35%) said that the different perspectives from having a variety of ages, genders, ethnicities, religions, etc. in their workforce allows their organization to be more innovative.

“Diverse, empowered teams working in inclusive, equitable environments can create products that appeal to a wider range of customers,” said Donnebra McClendon, Ceridian’s global head of DEI, adding that “significant financial investments” in DEI strategies will be necessary to make initiatives impactful.

At the same time, only 33% think that DEI progress is being made in their organization, and 19% said that they’re not seeing DEI impact on company culture.

Levit believes this is because the person or team in charge of DEI at many organizations lacks adequate resources, tools and clear key performance indicators (KPIs).

“Look at sentiment data. I think this is something we all have available at our disposal. Do people feel psychologically safe? Do they feel like they belong in your organization? And surveying different groups in different geographies and then slicing and dicing the data in different ways can give you some tremendous insights that you can then go and follow up on it in focus groups or through advocacy groups,” she said.