Crisis recovery and resilience
Your expert for questions
Jens Greiner
Director, Forensic Services at PwC Germany
Tel.: +49 69 9585-5831
Email
Disruption is inevitable. How will you respond?
A crisis has the potential to inflict devastating harm, impacting everything from organisational operations to financial stability and the health and safety of your teams. How prepared were you when the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe? What lessons have you learned and incorporated as you’ve navigated the massive changes of the past year? How can you position your company to weather the next crisis?
Exploring these questions will help you begin to build the foundation for a state of informed preparedness: the ability to execute an effective response to a crisis, recover, emerge stronger and maintain business resilience.
Strengthen resilience across your enterprise
The more prepared you are to manage disruption, the less destructive and long-lived the crisis will be for your business.
Incorporating lessons learned and leading global practices and standards, proper resilience planning can help your business withstand disruption and reduce the overall impacts of a crisis.
In the long term, organisational resilience will strengthen your ability to respond and adapt across four key organisational pillars:
- Technology and operational resilience: Sustain your core business functions and maintain the availability of key technology
- Workforce resilience: Maintain a productive workforce that’s able to execute on your corporate mission
- Data resilience: Maintain integrity and confidentiality of data and continue to meet your resilience and compliance goals
- Financial resilience: Retain liquidity and assets
The experts at PwC support you in your crisis response and help you return to a stable (new) normal. Additionally, we provide our comprehensive areas of expertise to directing you to the post-crisis opportunities. We also work with you to develop and implement new business strategies and provide project management support.
Building long-term resilience so your business can thrive
Too often when a crisis erupts, an organisation’s response is disjointed. Resilience competencies and teams, structured in silos that have been developed over many years, are not aligned. So when a significant event occurs, the teams, methods, and technologies aren’t able to function smoothly – and often create more challenges than solutions.
Better equip your organisation to enable a cohesive response by integrating core resilience competencies, such as business continuity, disaster recovery, incident management, physical security, threat intelligence and emergency response.
Your organisation will gain two key benefits:
- A consistent, enterprise-wide view of events and their significance
- The ability to launch a coordinated effort to respond to disruption
Define a strategy and operational crisis management plan
We work with you to ensure that your organisation emerges from a crisis with greater strength and resilience. In particular, we support you in optimising your organisation’s processes and adaptability so that you can spot future challenges at an early stage and address them effectively.
Anticipate and prepare: Maintain a state of informed preparedness in order to forestall compromises of mission critical functions
Respond and recover: Execute response procedures and restore mission critical functions after a major disruption
Withstand: Continue mission critical functions despite a disruption or critical outage, limiting significant impact and curtailing downtime
Sustain: Tap into knowledge from prior disruptive events to enhance your resilience processes and reduce adverse impacts in the future
Steps to better response to the next crisis
- Pursue strategic priorities
- Build a culture of resilience
- Anchor crisis response strategy
Pursue strategic priorities
According to PwC’s Global Crisis Survey, 85% of German companies modified their corporate strategy in response to the coronavirus crisis – an approach that PwC recommends for every company: analyse your crisis response approach, your crisis plan and your crisis management program overall. Identify your strengths and weaknesses and always measure them against your strategic goals. Then create an integrated program with the right governance. This should not just be a backup for emergencies: it must also be active 365 days a year and continuously updated. This may be performed in the light of a new corporate governance requirement, investments in new technology and other resources or changes in business operations.
Build a culture of resilience
When defined measures developed by the crisis team feed through across the entire organisation, companies gain an important instrument for proactive crisis management by establishing and reinforcing, encouraging and maintaining a culture of resilience, because all staff members put values into practice on a day-to-day basis. A culture of resilience offers opportunities for many aspects: technology, operational processes, finance and corporate governance. In the long term, it ensures stability and a consistent way forward.
Anchor crisis response strategy
You should firmly anchor resilience as a guiding concept for your organisation. On one hand, a crisis response strategy ensures that your company recovers more quickly after a disruptive event; on the other hand, it also strengthens your readiness to respond to the next crisis in peacetime. When adopting such a strategy, you should:
- Define levels of urgency and escalation triggers across functions
- Define roles and responsibilities and ensure proper competence is in place
- Anchor the strategy and the importance of resilience in the minds of your employees and in their everyday work life
Build resilience for your long-term success
The core of our approach is clear: We want to help organisations confidently navigate the prevailing economic volatility and to achieve a positive turnaround after a crisis. As experienced and leading experts in crisis management, we provide you with our deep knowledge and cutting edge technology and tools so that you can face any adverse situation quickly, efficiently and successfully and are well positioned for the future.
We have developed proprietary crisis assessment and management tools to help our clients identify their current capabilities and prepare responses for managing potential business crises.
We look at the risks and opportunities arising from a crisis situation by performing data-driven analyses from a holistic and strategic perspective. Here’s what we’ve realised: Real-time, data-driven decision-making helps organisations enormously in identifying, prioritising and tracking critical issues. This provides the leadership and crisis team with helpful information for systematically responding to a crisis situation.
“95% of German executives rate that their own crisis management skills are in need of improvement.”
Related content
Follow us
Contact us
