The early days and weeks of the pandemic were largely characterized by panic and frenzy. Nine months and many lessons later, most organizations are no longer in crisis mode. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that panic and frenzy have been replaced with fatigue. Those of us still standing have found ways to sustain ourselves through challenges that have lasted longer than we’d hoped, but it’s taken a toll. And without a firm expiration date on COVID, it’s not clear how much longer we’ll have to endure the circumstances we find ourselves in.
But one thing is crystal clear: Resilience is the number one attribute that helps us endure. That’s true during “normal” times, but even more apparent in times of distress. Before I continue, though, it’s important to establish what resilience is not.
It’s not the ability to work despite suffering, it’s not trudging along. Resilience is the positive adjustment to adversity, the capacity to bounce back—and fast.
Okay then. Now that we’re on the same page, let’s talk about how to foster resilience in the workplace. At Modern Tribe, leadership has worked for years to make resilience a cornerstone of our organization. And while we haven’t always executed on that perfectly, we have found that resilience hinges on five key tenets:
- Rose-colored glasses obscure red flags.
Plan for proactive and reactive change. - No single points of failure.
Distribute governance to prevent bottlenecks. - Write it down.
Document conventions and processes, and make them accessible. - Eat your vegetables.
Prioritize health and hygiene over trends and novelty. - No guessing!
Make decisions based on data.
And all these tenets can be applied to both organizations and the technology that supports them. Let’s break that down.
Plan for proactive and reactive change.
Resilience is built when you’re not under duress. It’s the result of creating processes and tools with enough flexibility to adjust to changing demands and priorities before they even start shifting.
In Your Organization
As COVID has shown us, creating space for the unexpected isn’t optional—it’s imperative for survival in a rapidly changing world. So when you’re writing an annual plan for your team or department, don’t set objectives that are only achievable if everything goes right. Give yourself some wiggle room to invest in unexpected opportunities or mitigate unexpected challenges.
For Modern Tribe’s agency business, we don’t book our teams at 100% capacity. Instead, we target 80 to 90% utilization so we have the elasticity to accommodate urgent requests from clients, a surge from underestimated projects, or an unexpected long-term absence from a team member.
On Your Platform
Running on an agile workflow allows for unexpected security or performance updates to flow in with planned updates. Take the website for our products suite, The Events Calendar, for example. We know it will need about three WordPress core updates each year, along with six or more plugin updates. So we build a backlog of these planned maintenance sprints, allowing us to slot in security patches or other unexpected updates whenever necessary.
Distribute governance to prevent bottlenecks.
If someone in your company were to be out of the office indefinitely, for any reason, would their team or projects crumble? If the answer is yes, it’s time to revamp responsibilities and access. To do that effectively, define every team member’s role with an eye toward autonomy. Empower your teams by making sure everyone has access to the tools they need to do their jobs.
In Your Organization
Admittedly, distributed governance is a concept we struggle with ourselves. We run lean, and we don’t have a lot of redundancy in our roles. But the leadership team does do a lot of our work collaboratively so any number of people can pick up a dropped ball. In general, we look for T-shaped people who can influence our organization in a variety of ways. And we often try to have an understudy for director roles, someone who’s learning the necessary skills and could eventually grow into it. But that’s hard to do financially without a lot of overhead.
On Your Platform
We focus on building user-friendly tools that have self-service features and don’t rely heavily on code deploys or development support. It takes more upfront investment to build a feature with an admin UI, but it’s also more sustainable in the long term. For instance, if a client wants their employees to be able to add locations or edit details in a store locator feature, we build an admin interface that makes it easy for anyone, not just a developer, to do that.
Ultimately, the reason we lean on open-source software is so we can give organizations the tools necessary to ensure their platform works the way their teams need it to. More often than not, we also encourage clients to simplify their permissioning. They often think they need complex custom permissioning to restrict access within their organizations. But they usually come back and ask us to simplify it when they realize they can be more efficient if more people have the ability to work autonomously.
Document conventions and processes, and make them accessible.
Liberal access and permission are definitely important, but they’ll only get you so far. You also have to make sure people know how and when to use what they can touch, and that it’s all recorded someplace. Documentation facilitates coverage during unexpected outages and helps to smooth transitions between incoming and outgoing employees.
In Your Organization
Internal knowledge bases—whether they live in forums, Google docs, or an intranet—are crucial for the success of any business, no matter how big or small. Without them, it’s 10 times harder to standardize tools and processes across an entire organization or even across teams, especially as more people come on board. We built a team wiki using MediaWiki to keep track of internal processes and project documentation. We also have a WordPress-based intranet with archives of company meetings, announcements, and company FAQs. Role descriptions and training guides live in Google docs in designated “Tools and Workflows” folders for each team.
On Your Platform
When it comes to websites, documentation can take several forms depending on whose eyes it’s meant for. Training libraries featuring short how-to videos, for example, are ideal for storing information that’s useful to numerous employees. Inline code documentation is a handy resource for developers with questions about code and infrastructure. (Making it clear to developers that a project isn’t done until it’s documented helps ensure that documentation stays up to date.) And design systems can be documented in tools like Figma to enhance brand management beyond hand-off. When your design system lives in a user-friendly platform, it can be updated by the creative team and referenced by anyone without much effort.
Prioritize health and hygiene over trends and novelty.
In the age of the internet, it’s entirely possible to discover some cool new tool/concept/method on a daily basis. But chasing every bright, shiny object that enters your field of vision will just make you seem fickle, restless, and unpredictable. (Do I really need to explain why that’s bad for business?) The best way to grow strategically is to make decisions based on measurable, trackable information—not your best guess or a gut feeling.
In Your Organization
It’s never been clearer in our lifetime that your team’s physical and mental health directly impacts your organization’s bottom line. When team members are well, you can respond to adversity with calm and precision, because you’re not scrambling to cover outages that will leave you unable to fulfill current commitments or take on new business.
We use weekly internal surveys to gauge the health of our team and identify any pain points. Google Forms can be a great fee-free tool to facilitate this, or paid tools like Lattice can offer more data analysis and benchmarking from your industry peers. We also notify clients when wellness issues could impact how and when our team members interact with them. We did this recently to help set expectations around video calls while kids and caregivers are all working from home. Tracking time and resources so that workloads are balanced, and building a strong company culture that isn’t dependent on physical proximity are a couple other ways you can improve your team’s overall well-being.
On Your Platform
Whether it’s your platform or your SUV, it’s usually more cost-effective to take care of what you have now to prevent major repairs and performance issues down the road. We recommend keeping files clean, running automated tests, and making sure you’re on the latest releases for any core or plugin code. Sometimes taking the easy way out when it comes to maintenance ends up introducing technical debt and overhead that makes that approach not so easy after all.
Make decisions based on data.
It’s true that some investment and configuration is required up front to put good data at your fingertips. But it’s totally worth it because more informed decisions can save you a ton of money in the long run. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking data is a silver bullet. You need people in your organization who review it regularly and are able to glean insights from a range of data points instead of simply reacting to a single metric.
In Your Organization
To make data-based decisions in your organization, leadership has to be transparent about revenue, costs, projections, anticipated profit margins. And it’s not enough to have a target number. You’ve also got to have a handle on what’s good for the business, what’s risky, and what indicates you’re really in trouble. COVID was particularly difficult for us because it brought into question all our forecasting data. But we were at least able to model some potential outcomes based on various historical touchpoints, such as the 2008 recession.
On Your Platform
As you probably know, there’s no shortage of tools and methods for gathering data about your website, but Google Analytics is a good place to start. And A/B testing tools like Optimizely and Google Optimize are super helpful for determining which pages or copy are driving traffic and conversions. To get a comprehensive look at how your platform is supporting your business goals, curate a dashboard that combines your organizational data with your platform data using Google Data Studio, Tableau, or some other reporting tool.
Progress, Not Perfection.
So… You still with me? I know I’ve thrown a lot at you, but these five tenets don’t have to be tackled overnight or even all at once. In fact, incremental change can be very valuable. When you switch up a lot of things simultaneously, it can be hard to determine what made the most impact.
But whenever you do start to examine your team, department, or organization—perhaps to help you prepare for the year ahead—know that you can always contact our team to take a look under the hood and see how your tech is performing.