New research reveals staggering differences in employee performance within UK and Ireland organisations based on their level of workforce resilience.

Huge gaps in performance in competitiveness, productivity and other important capabilities exist between organisations with highest and lowest levels of resilience. Despite almost all HR professionals surveyed (93%) agreeing that workforce resilience is a priority.

Coming at a time when businesses are undergoing digital transformation, accommodating new patterns of remote working, and adapting to a post-pandemic economy, the research explored three key dimensions of workforce resilience – organisational resilience, employee resilience, and process resilience. Senior HR leaders were asked to rank their organisations on a range of metrics within these three key areas.

Resilient organisations are agile and capable of responding quickly to change, resilient employees are engaged, motivated and open to ideas, while process resilience is founded on HR systems that are intuitive, automated and accessible.

The findings reveal how companies in the top-ranking quartile for workforce resilience are performing far better than other organisations in almost every respect – from customer satisfaction to productivity, profitability, agility and brand reputation. This includes:

• 82% of the most resilient companies in the research say they are much better than their competition for delivering customer satisfaction. Just 10% of companies in the least resilient category claim they perform better than competitors in this area.
• 80% of companies with high resilience ratings say their employees are more productive and produce better quality work than competitors, compared with 16% of companies giving themselves the lowest ratings for resilience.
• 76% of the most resilient companies rate themselves much better than their competition on brand reputation, compared with 14% in the bottom category for resilience.
• 69% of the most resilient rate themselves better for their new business win-rate than their competitors, compared with just 4% of the least resilient companies in the research.

“These findings show the importance of workforce resilience to competitiveness and outstanding business performance,” said Anton Roe, CEO, MHR. “Resilience is not a short-term change because of the pandemic. There’s now a necessity for businesses to be able to evolve, sometimes at pace, and keep up with changing demands and environments. By equipping themselves with the tools to plan ahead, businesses can put plans in place to use a flexible mix of permanent and contingent resources to provide agility to adapt to any shifts in their business model. However, it is important to retain internal cohesion to offer a sense of common purpose and focus through periods of change. Ultimately, having a workforce with strong employee resilience is the catalyst for organisations to be able to adapt to today’s ever-changing world and meet demands in the future.

“Strong leadership and a nurturing culture are essential but so are good communication, an extensive skills base and the right technology for effective implementation of policies, processes and programmes.”

*Research from MHR International