You’ve made progress towards building agency resilience.

You’ve made progress towards building agency resilience. Like all things, the practice of developing and maintaining the skills to easily adapt during disruptions takes time and effort. To build the foundation that you have already started, consider the following recommendations to take your resilience to the next level:

1. Self-Regulating: Make a practice of harnessing lessons learned from past disruptions. Soon after normal operations resume, gather staff from different levels (management and front-line staff) to examine what process worked well and which need fine-tuning to help your team shift and pivot effortlessly.

Watch the on-demand webinar ‘Each One Teach One: Integrating Lessons Learned from Crisis Events and Disruptions’ for practical ways your agency can harness lessons learned!

2. Diverse: Continue (or start!) fostering a culture that recognizes the value of cross-functional training. For example: choose one essential function or task to examine at each monthly team meeting. During those meetings, do a deep dive into how the team can share responsibilities and maintain the continuity of that service during an interruption or if an essential program member is absent.

Watch the video on Agency Succession Planning and Cross-Training to learn how your agency can build staffing resilience.

3. Aware: Keep a keen eye out for anything that could hamper the progress you’ve made in building resilience. Consider the following questions: What’s the biggest risk to your resilience? What’s one thing that could happen that would significantly lower your defenses against a disruption? Is there something that could erase progress you’ve made or negatively impact how far you’ve come? After you’ve answered these questions, identify practical steps you can take to lessen these risks.