Following the success of Team GB at the Rio Olympic Games, resulting in the best performance in over 100 years, we take a closer look at what was behind their astounding achievement, and what lessons energy suppliers could learn.
Last week, we analysed Team GB’s use of marginal gains, the impact it had on their performance in Rio, and how energy suppliers could apply the same principles to achieve their own success.
This week: Succession Planning & Resilience
In our third and final blog reflecting on Team GB’s performance at Rio 2016, we’re looking at two of their less obvious keys to success – succession planning, and resilience.
Succession Planning is, put simply, the ability to invest in performance not just today, but in tomorrow. For Team GB, this meant ensuring that the stars of London 2012 continued to thrive, but also passed their learnings and motivation onto their successors.
For the energy industry, succession planning has traditionally been a task focused on tackling the all too common issue of ‘brain drain’ – talented professionals moving onto bigger and better roles elsewhere, taking their expertise with them. The role HR has to play here is obvious, but no matter how good your staff retention policy is, it’s inevitable that you will lose key personnel at some point in time, and with it will go their experience.
The ultimate solution to this problem, and the real key to succession planning, is automation. By building into a system the experience and expertise of your best people, and developing automation to maintain this level consistently, you can free the business up from the cyclical catch-up process of gain-train-lose., and give it the freedom to focus on much longer term strategies and goals for your people and your business.
Resilience follows on from this – with automation covering the issue of succession planning in the traditional HR sense, a new problem arises in ensuring that these automated systems are well protected. The answer to this problem is the cloud. Today, businesses of any size can access world class IT infrastructure through cloud based hosting services from the likes of Amazon and Microsoft, with software giants like Netflix and Google all hosting their critical services in the cloud.
At ENSEK, succession planning and resilience are two principles at the heart of our technology. Built around intelligent automation, and hosted in the cloud for complete scalability and resilience, our solutions ensure that energy suppliers are equipped with a firm foundation for growth – from market entry, right through to maturity.
