The pandemic has emphasised the importance of striking a balance between how much you trust and how much you monitor. Another way of putting it is this: How do you empower the 99% who deserve your trust while keeping an eye on the 1% who risk putting you in the headlines for all the wrong reasons – for example a major case of fraud?

In this article we propose five broad steps organisations can be taking to emerge from the crisis stronger and build the agility and resilience to flourish in a future where constant transformation is the order of the day.

Step 1: Foster a culture of trust

This boils down to showing trust to earn trust. The good news we’re hearing from clients is that productivity has gone up during the crisis. Broadly speaking, you can rely on people to manage their own time, even when they’re working from home. People want that flexibility, so it makes sense to empower them to make the choices that work best for them, the business and their team.

On the basis of what you’ve learned from the COVID-19 experience, you might want to consider formulating hybrid working options that take account of different people’s needs. The solutions you come up with will depend on the nature of your business – including the specific blend of on-site, off-site and homeworking that’s necessary for it to function.

Trust has to be earned, by everyone concerned. Many leaders are going to have to adopt a different mindset, accept the fact that they can no longer monitor people on site, assess the amount and type of control that’s necessary, and find new ways of achieving it. You also have to assess your managers’ ability to manage people. Do they have the skills – and attitudes – to do so in a virtual environment? To get these things right, guidance, communication and buy-in from top management are crucial. Values have to permeate all levels of the organisation, so management should be owning and pushing the process, setting an example of doing the right things even when people aren’t watching.

If you succeed in building a robust culture of trust, a very valuable spinoff will be a workplace better able to attract and retain the talented, self-determined digital natives most businesses will need if they’re to prosper in the future.

Step 2: Identify what the changes are in the risk landscape

Now’s a good time for your board to be thinking about what’s shifting in terms of people and technology. Chances are that there are changes in the landscape, with new risks emerging, existing risks evolving and some risks increasing. How does your organisation intend to

prioritise these risks and set the balance? Getting the overview will enable you to decide what you need to look out for and monitor, and what steps will be required to do so. The solutions are likely to include good governance structures and robust internal controls to mitigate risks.

Some of the risks may be fairly obvious. More widespread remote working has led to unprecedented cyber-risks – vulnerabilities that bad actors have been quick to exploit during the pandemic with fraudulent emails and a whole host of other underhand tactics. While the problem is obvious and plenty of best practices exist to tackle it, many companies are underestimating the threat and failing to respond adequately.

Some risks might be completely new and unexpected. Before COVID-19, who could have foreseen a situation where traders from different banks were living – and working – in shared housing? How do you deal with the confidentiality implications of this? Solutions have been found. Another example is the two-week holiday rule commonly imposed by financial institutions to trip up embezzlers: how do you enforce absence from the workplace when most people are taking staycation? There are technical means available to do this by monitoring people’s system access, but not every organisation is able to implement them.

Step 3: Step up enterprise resilience

The next crisis will be different. How do you become more resilient for it? The answer lies in enterprise resilience – what you might call the ability to roll with the punches.

Building enterprise resilience involves working out how to integrate activities such as risk management, compliance and business continuity that used to take place in silos, often on a narrow checklist basis. It also means understanding what your critical business services are, strengthening the relevant processes, and building in redundancies. Many organisations have become very lean. But the crisis has shown the dangers of being too pared back and the importance of redundancies (for example alternative suppliers) in key parts of the business.

Adapting to the health, social and geopolitical risks brought by COVID-19 has taught us a lot about enterprise resilience. Acquiring enterprise resilience makes you more agile and able to respond to unexpected changes and rebound cost-effectively. Now’s a good time to look back at what has worked well and where improvements are needed to cope more effectively the next time around. Think about your three lines of defence (front-line staff and operational management; the risk management and compliance functions; the internal audit function), what role they need to play, and what synergies can be sought going forward.

Step 4: Understand what your people want and how you can take care of them

The pandemic has been a reminder that safeguarding your employees’ health – both physical and mental – is business critical. Productivity may have increased, but so too have the frequency and speed of work. With back-to-back meetings and a lack of boundaries between work and home, the risk is that exhaustion starts to set in. You have to find ways of managing your people so they don’t get burnt out. It’s not just us who are saying so: a recent survey by Gartner (see 9 Future of Work Trends Post-COVID-19, Gartner, 2020) on new ways of working concludes that companies will have to take better care of their employees, otherwise both their business and their reputation will suffer.

Naturally people are finding their own ways of looking out for each other: checking in, mirroring, sharing. The COVID-19 crisis has prompted more progressive employers to institutionalise these kinds of behaviours and set up formal programmes to safeguard their employees’ mental and physical wellbeing. This involves recognising that people need different outlets and areas of support. But at a more fundamental level it may entail taking an honest look at whether company leadership is walking the talk. There’s nothing more demotivating than a gap between stated corporate ambitions and what people are actually experiencing. Has the strain of the pandemic shown up some of these cracks?

There’s so much to be gained from earnest endeavours to find out what your people really want and working out how to combine this with the needs of the business. COVID-19 can serve as a catalyst, encouraging employers to consider the needs of their current workforce and the expectations of new generations that take things like remote working, digital and self-determination for granted.

Step 5: Be courageous with change in relation to technology

Now’s the time to foster a culture of agility and get ready for rapid change by adopting new technology and training your people to use it. The degree of individual organisations’ tech maturity varies widely. When COVID-19 came along, many were wondering how to get insights into their business without actually being there. The technology certainly exists – for example new data and analytics solutions such as continuous monitoring on the basis of dashboards and virtual risk indicators – but companies with less tech experience were afraid to get into it. But once they took the plunge, they realised that it worked and gave them something they didn’t have before.

The fact is that better use of transactional data, artificial intelligence (AI) and continuous monitoring technology enables unprecedented insights into the business. These technologies empower the first line of defence, the people actually running the processes, to control the risks. This will also trigger a transformation in the lines of defence and how they interact with each other – which is a good step forward.