Just like the year 2000 we had imagined twenty years earlier, 2020 certainly hasn't been the year we imagined back in 2000. Instead of 26-hour workweeks and a crewed mission to Mars, 2020 was defined by the unanticipated: a global health crisis—and in turn, businesses were defined by their resilience in the face of it.

Harvard Business Review defines business resilience as “a company’s capacity to absorb stress, recover critical functionality, and thrive in altered circumstances.” At 8x8, we’ve had the opportunity to hear from and help countless customers who are prime examples of resilience, and who through digital reinvention of varying degrees, now stand to enjoy these benefits:

  • The ability through insights to better anticipate threats
  • The ability to better resist and withstand shocks to the business
  • The ability to rebound more quickly
  • Increased fitness and agility in an uncertain future

Resilience through business communications

In 2020, digital transformation took on a whole new meaning—and a frenetic turn. In early 2020, Forrester estimated that businesses spent $15 billion a week for three months on stopgap, point solutions to enable remote work. Now focused on long-term resilience, many organizations are looking at solutions to go beyond just making “work from home” work to operating from anywhere—whether that be with a fully remote or hybrid workforce.

In a recent Q & A, Ventana Research CEO and Chief Research Officer Mark Smith discussed the benefits of a platform approach when it comes to overall business resilience:

“Everyone in the workforce should have the ability to complete tasks and activities using digital communications in a sustainable manner, in spite of any type of disruptive event or condition; this is the essence of business resilience, to operate in a continuous manner with little-to-no impact on the workforce or relationships with customers, partners and suppliers."

And organizational readiness hinges on empowering the organization’s workers to use digital communications to collaborate at any time, for any reason (while also extending these communication capabilities outward to customers, partners and suppliers).

“Utilizing an open communications platform allows for the agility and responsiveness that supports business continuity,” notes Smith.

Read more from Smith on business continuity and the digital work experience, or assess your own organization’s current status.