Abstract:

The COVID19 pandemic showed that resilience is key to tackle unpredictable negative events. Europe enterprises are trying to bounce back from the negative impacts caused by the multiple lockdowns, confinement restrictions, loss of productivity, just to name a few factors. To survive this economic, health and social crisis, enterprises must display organisational resilience, supported by adaptive management systems. With the rise of global warming, the probability of another pandemic, major migration patterns (and others), it’s a case of knowing how to deal with the next crisis (not IF there will be a next crisis). Nevertheless, organisations face adversities daily and the way they respond to such adversities can make the organisation fragile (if acting rigidly) or flexible (if acting through a set of skills that promote the efficiency and growth of the organisation) (Sutcliffe & Vogus, 2003).

Organisational resilience is the ability of organisations to face adversity in such a way that generates a response that allows the bouncing back and activation of coping mechanisms, the achievement of a healthy/positive adaptation, plus the development of new capabilities and the expansion of skills that allow the exploration of opportunities and the construction of skills to deal with future adversities (Coutu, 2002). This is achieved by two components: a) the individual resilience of the organisation workforce (when used collectively) and b) the systemic resilience of the organization processes (system capacity) (Irigaray, Paiva, & Goldschmidt, 2017).

In the framework of an European project, a guideline to support the implementation of Systemic Resilience Practices within enterprises has been designed and validated by experts. The main aims of the process were:
a) provide an initial, valid and reliable guideline on organizational resilience in small companies from the theoretical perspective of the stakeholders
b) design a guideline/protocol to help enterprises (specially SME) implement resilent practices within their organization
c) validate the document by an experts panel

The design of the protocol was carried out by the authors of the paper based on a literature revision and an external validation process was adopted by recruiting a total of 12 international experts in organizational practices that assessed the initial document by responding a self-administered questionnaire. As a result, diverse changes and improvements were made in the original version of the guideline.

Some characteristics of the resulting guideline are:
The following competence units are developed:
CU1: Adaptative management overview
CU2: Adaptative management in enterprises
CU3: Monitoring and evaluation methodologies designed to deal with complexity
CU4: Business data collection and analysis
CU5: Characterization of system uncertainty
CU6: Embracing risk and uncertainty
CU7: Iterative decision-making
CU8: Tactical and Strategical adaption
CU9: Organizational Learning (feedback mechanisms)

For each competence a set of skills and ways to assess them are facilitated as well as examples and a proposal of implementation are developed.
The guideline/protocol developed to help introducing resilent practices in enterprises stands not only as a valid and reliable tool but also as a useful guide for managers that want to develop resilent pratices in their firms/companies.

Acknowledgement:
FENIX (2021-1-ES01-KA220-VET-000032954) is an ERASMUS+ KA2 project funded by the EU.

Keywords:

Organizational resilience, learning competences, enterprise training.