Resilience is central to all our futures in these unprecedented times
We are all aware of the brilliant work of those in the medical profession, globally, the support given to the vulnerable by an army of selfless volunteers, the military, the police and public services. Furthermore, there are lesser-known critical functions provided by the business sector, which include essential utilities, supply chains and support.
Also leading by example are those who have completely refocused their organisations to urgently produce vital equipment in the global war on COVID-19, putting society ahead of their core business and profits.
As well as physical and mental strength, resilience is just as much about team flexibility, capability and planning. Whilst crises can paralyse human behaviour, it can also bring out the very best in people when we try to mitigate the situation.
This is still early days for us all; however, we need to ensure that we have the resilience to continue within a constantly changing environment and for a lengthy period of time.
The coming months will result in a massive cultural shift that may fundamentally change the way we live and work.
Organisations will seed better structures, where resilience is the catalyst to operate and function more robustly.
We will use the approaches learnt from this adversity to help people and society, as a whole. There are ideas formulating now as we find solutions to the immediate problems that will drive a step-change in the way we do things and help others in the future.
The lessons we learn as individuals and organisations over the coming months should define behaviours when we return at some point to a different normality.
Global EMS refinements
We are very fortunate to be carrying out a critical function in paying people globally and supporting organisations in the continuation of other business functions including Human Resources, Finance and IT.
Our business model is thus designed to be secure, highly automated and operated remotely from around the world. Our continuity plan involved little change other than a move from occasionally working from home to doing so all the time. Our work routine is more efficient with travelling time reduced and the comradery between our people has shone through to provide mutual support preventing ‘cabin fever’.
For broader resilience, the main change to our procedures has been from using just a primary and secondary account manager to the formal structure of Primary, Secondary, Tertiary coupled with ready access to each project and process by colleagues, enabling a broader service delivery.
Whilst EMS has always been resilient, our service has adapted due to the challenge of COVID-19, to include our clients and stakeholders unplanned needs.
Resilience and Service
As a company that has been running for 17 years with a ‘family culture’, most of our people have been with EMS for a long time and are friends, family as well as colleagues.
Our team is used to dealing with change and increasing breadth of service with tremendous agility. Those additional services that are affected by payroll, include elements of HR, Finance and IT. Hitherto, these additional services have put payroll into context in an organisation and been provided only as required. To ensure better resilience within our client companies, we are therefore adding planning; and an increased service breadth as part of our core function. We have successfully provided these services to our clients in the past, EMS is now extending our main service offering to include those supporting client resilience.
We recognise that we have the capability to provide more to our clients and society as a whole and are adjusting some of the things we and our people do. More details to come…
Get in contact with us today on – enquiries@global-ems.com – to find out how we can help you in payroll, expense management and the supporting functions of HR, Finance and IT.
