Business resilience: How to transform the future of your business

EY, a global consulting and research firm, describes today’s environment as a “NAVI” world: Non-linear, Accelerated, Volatile and Interconnected. The descriptors make sense. Businesses face constant change and challenges from every direction, from geopolitical instability and climate-related disasters to AI disruption and major demographic shifts.

These forces are impacting industries at an unprecedented pace. A supply chain interruption or severe weather event on one side of the world can affect operations across multiple continents, while new AI technologies can disrupt established business models overnight.

To survive these challenges, business resiliency is critical. Let’s break down what business resiliency actually means and the two-pronged approach to becoming a resilient company.

What is business resiliency?

Business resiliency refers to your company’s ability to deal with incoming challenges with minimal setbacks. That definition sounds simple enough, but it covers a lot of ground including operational continuity, financial stability, workforce agility, supply chain flexibility and technological adaptability, among others.

A big part of being resilient is adaptability. While resilience and adaptability are closely connected, they’re slightly different. Resilience is the ability to withstand disruption, while adaptability is the ability to adjust to new circumstances. Not every challenge requires a major business transformation, but some situations do. The businesses that can successfully adapt when necessary are often the ones that remain resilient over the long term.

Building resilience in business, then, is ultimately about creating an organization that can absorb shocks, respond effectively and continue moving forward regardless of what changes occur around it.

Building a business resilience strategy

Building resilience into your business requires work on two fronts.

The first is creating a culture where resilience is embedded into how employees think and operate. The second is providing the tools and resources that enable employees to act resiliently when challenges arise.

1. Create a culture of resilience

It can be tempting to focus heavily on disaster recovery plans, continuity strategies and risk management procedures. While these are important, a solid business resilience framework goes beyond documentation. After all, having a plan means little if people buckle under pressure and fail to follow procedure.

One study found that the top three influential factors in organizational resilience were:

• Emotion-focused coping, or the ability to manage emotional distress during periods of uncertainty and disruption
• Employee resilience, or how well employees can actively respond to disruption, adapt and develop new policies to deal with uncertainty
• Managerial resilience, or a manager’s ability to overcome high-impact challenges, respond quickly to unfavorable situations and ensure business continuity

In other words, becoming a resilient company relies on having the right people, not just the right processes.

This starts during the hiring stage. Beyond evaluating technical skills, organizations should look for candidates who demonstrate emotional intelligence, adaptability, and a willingness to learn. Employees who have successfully navigated change in previous roles often bring valuable resilience traits to their new workplace.

Leadership also plays a critical role. Social support has been identified as having an important impact on employee resilience. A resilient manager can inspire, guide and reinforce that quality in employees through “caring, collaborative relationships” in the workplace.

Recognition systems should reinforce resilient behaviors as well. Teams that successfully navigate challenges, develop creative solutions, or embrace change should be acknowledged and rewarded. This helps reinforce the idea that resilience is not simply a reaction to crisis but a valuable business capability.

Enforcing resilience and adaptability within your company culture breeds other advantages, too. Research from the McKinsey Health Institute found that individuals who score high on both resilience and adaptability are over three times more likely than peers to report high engagement at work and nearly four times more likely to report an increase in innovative behaviors.

The March 2025 fire and power outage at Heathrow Airport offers a real-world example. When a fire knocked out power in the middle of the night, Heathrow’s chief executive was asleep and didn’t receive the emergency alerts or his colleague’s calls. It was the airport’s chief operating officer who ended up making the call at 1:15 am to suspend operations, disrupting thousands of flights worldwide.

While Heathrow certainly had emergency procedures in place, it was ultimately the team’s ability to act decisively under pressure that kept the disruption contained. The airport reopened for limited flights the next day and was fully operational within two days, with a later review confirming that Heathrow made the right decisions under the difficult circumstances.

2. Equip employees with the right tools

Culture is just the start. A well-rounded business resilience strategy also requires giving employees the systems and tools that enable them to work effectively regardless of what’s happening around them.

For instance, risk management software gives leadership the visibility to anticipate and respond to threats before they escalate. Rather than reacting to crises, teams can monitor indicators, model scenarios and prioritize responses based on actual risk exposure.

Tools that enable mobility are also essential. Flexible, remote-capable work setups mean that disruptions to a physical location don’t automatically become disruptions to operations. When employees can work from anywhere without degraded capability, your organization becomes inherently harder to knock offline.

Communication tools are especially critical for keeping a distributed workforce functional during disruption. When a crisis hits, the businesses that maintain continuity are typically the ones whose teams can stay connected without depending on any single physical location or device.

The pandemic, in particular, really showed how important it is to have flexible communication infrastructure. According to a survey of contact center leaders, nearly two-thirds of contact center migrations to the cloud occurred during the pandemic, with three-quarters of managers agreeing that the cloud infrastructure made their organizations more strategic and business-oriented. Also, 60% of contact centers believe that the cloud has increased employee satisfaction and engagement.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone systems have become a core part of resilient communication infrastructure. Unlike traditional landlines, VoIP systems run over the internet rather than physical lines, which makes them cloud-based, location-independent, and easy to scale as your business grows. For companies that still run on traditional phone lines, transitioning to VoIP is a good starting point for making your organization more resilient.

Transform the future of your business by strengthening business resiliency

The future will always contain uncertainty. No organization can fully control geopolitical events, technological disruption, climate risks, or economic volatility. But what you can control is how prepared you are to respond.

That’s why resilience should be a core part of any business transformation strategy. That involves developing a workforce that can adapt to change, implementing risk management systems that provide visibility into emerging threats, and ensuring your communication infrastructure can withstand disruption.

Switching to VoIP is one practical step in that direction. Compared to traditional landline systems, VoIP typically lowers communication costs while making billing more predictable and flexible. It’s also a more reliable long-term option as providers continue to phase out aging copper-based telephone networks. Beyond cost and reliability benefits, modern VoIP systems include advanced features, like apps and conference calling, that help employees collaborate more effectively from anywhere.

Ooma’s VoIP solutions can help you build a more resilient communications foundation while supporting broader transformation goals. With reliable service and powerful collaboration features, your team can stay connected and productive, even when circumstances change unexpectedly.