What does business resilience mean to you?

Did you know that nearly 1 in 5 UK businesses suffer a major disruption once a year? Change is inevitable and it’s impossible to predict what’s around the corner. Over the past few years, UK businesses alone have faced Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and most recently, the cost-of-living crisis. How prepared was your business for these events? Is there anything that you would change if you had to face something similar again?

Managing change isn’t easy, but with processes and workflows in place that set out what your business should do in the face of a major disruptive event, organisations have a better chance of continuing to operate through turbulent times. We look at what your business needs to do to become more resilient to disruptive events, helping you to make the right choices among the chaos. 

What is business resilience?

The term ‘business resilience’ describes a business’s ability to adapt to, and continue to operate under, unforeseen disruption. This can include natural disasters, economic disrepair and major supply chain failures. To become resilient, a business should have a series of holistic management processes – or a ‘business resilience plan’ in place for the ‘what ifs’ – changes that have the potential to cause significant disruption to the day-to-day running of your business.

For example:

What if your business is affected by a flood or fire?
What if your energy supply was interrupted for a day? What if it was a week?
What if your business was targeted by a cyberattack, resulting in a data breach?

While it’s impossible to predict exactly what the future holds, by having a series of processes in place, your business will be better prepared should disaster strike.

Creating a business resilience plan

There are several stages to building a business resilience plan, including:

Analysis – Conducting a full risk evaluation to determine your priorities, how these would be impacted by key disruptions and how much time you would have before the situation became critical. At this stage, you should consider your resources and what is realistic for your organisation.

  Design and Implementation – Consider the processes and strategies required for your business to correctly respond to and recover from the key disruptions above. These processes will need to account for areas such as business processes, who is responsible for backup arrangements and emergency contacts. Consider how will these be presented – will they be heavily detailed or set out as a series of checklists?

Testing – It’s crucial that you immediately test your plans for any gaps or discrepancies, you can do this using walkthrough exercises or by using online or physical simulations. You can then tweak the processes based on your findings.

Business resilience and insurance

While creating a business resilience plan can make the difference between a company surviving unexpected events or not, for many, being truly resilient as a business means much more than simply having a Business Continuity Plan in place.

Part of ensuring your business is resilient is making sure that you have the right insurance in place. From Business Interruption cover to Cyber Insurance, these policies are all geared to ensuring that you have financial support should disaster strike. Without the right foundations, your business could be in trouble from the offset.   

To make sure you get this right, at Edwards Insurance Brokers, we know insurance inside and out and can help you shape a policy that mitigates the risks that your business faces. To find out more about how we can help your business, just get in touch on 01564 730 900.