By Paul May >>

THE ENVIRONMENTAL cost of natural disasters is now an almost daily feature on the news agenda, yet many businesses are still doing little to address their own vulnerability.

It’s not difficult to see why natural disaster management often falls by the wayside. By its very nature, an unpredictable event is not something your business can control. In the face of more pressing issues and the next earnings season, it’s easy for events like natural disasters to be relegated to the end of a ‘to do’ list.

But these assumptions, like the weather, are changing as extreme events make the threat increasingly impossible to ignore. Just this year there’s been a mass fish death, floods in Townsville, bushfires across Tasmania and we recorded the hottest month in our national history. 

Some of our biggest local brands are already factoring in this risk. Telstra is preparing for the impact of bushfires on phone towers, Crown is flood-proofing its casinos and BHP is protecting itself against cyclones that could seriously disrupt its iron ore exports.

The rising number and severity of extreme weather events looks sure to continue. According to the CSIRO’s 2018 State of the Climate report, Australia will see more extreme flooding caused by rising sea levels, wind and rain damage from tropical cyclones and increased bushfires thanks to drier weather.

Climate change is no longer just a political talking point – it’s a business reality. Mitigating the potential impact means tackling it head on.

A CONNECTED WORLD

The increased risk of natural disasters caused by climate change isn’t limited to Australia’s borders. Thanks to the global nature of supply chains, those risks spread across the region and around the world regardless of the industry your business operates in.

Given its proximity, Asia plays a key role in many Australian supply chains, particularly when it comes to low-cost manufacturing. This region encompasses some of the most disaster-prone areas on the planet – from typhoons in Hong Kong to flooding in Thailand.

While they impact every part of a business, the extended supply chain is not always the first thought when it comes to climate risk mitigation.

But it should be.

The potential financial and economic implications of natural catastrophes include a long-term negative impact on your business growth, financial security and even brand reputation.

A MATTER OF WHEN, NOT IF

The onus is on your business to assess natural disaster risk and ensure adequate resilience. This responsibility usually rests on the shoulders of executive directors and, as climate change risk becomes more obvious, this liability is fast becoming more personal.

In a landmark opinion, Sydney-based senior counsel Noel Hutley and barrister Sebastian Hartford Davis have written that there are now “significant and well-publicised risks associated with climate change and global warming that would be regarded by a court as foreseeable … large-scale firms would be expected to invest seriously in capabilities to monitor, manage and respond to climate change risks”.

They further argue that individual directors could be exposed to climate change litigation if they’re not appropriately managing risk.

It will also impact business more generally. There has been an increase in shareholder activism, where groups of advocates pressure businesses to change their approach to climate risk.

The Australian Centre for Corporate Responsibility and other groups have called for Australia’s biggest banks, utilities, insurers and miners to improve disclosure and improve risk management.

WHAT CAN BE DONE

With this growing liability, how should your business manage the increased risk posed by climate change? Rigorous analysis is key.

Understanding the vulnerabilities means decision-makers know where to act. Loss prevention measures taken proactively as part of capital allocation decisions help to futureproof your business.

Tools will come in handy here, including FM Global’s Global Flood Map. This provides a worldwide view of moderate and high-hazard flood zones but, rather than using historical and statistical data, it is based on scientific fact using parameters such as rainfall, evaporation, snowmelt and terrain.

These considerations are increasingly important as natural disasters caused by climate change continue to grow in both frequency and ferocity. As the world moves into a new era of risk, your business directors have a responsibility to ensure they’re managing it appropriately.

The likelihood of natural disasters impacting your business has never been higher. It’s time to be prepared.

www.fmglobal.com.au

Paul May is the operations engineering manager for FM Global, an international insurance group that focuses specifically on commercial and industrial property insurance and assists its client businesses to become more resilient and better prepared for natural disasters and business interruptions.

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By Leon Gettler >>

THE BIG buzzword in business is customer experience, or CX. How to attract them and keep them coming back.

Unfortunately, most businesses struggle with it. They don’t understand what it means.

Enter Tom Uhlhorn, who runs the Melbourne based Customer Experience consultancy Tiny CX. It has launched the first practical online CX course, known as the CX Academy.

It offers online and face to face services for customers. The mix of offerings includes small group workshops for start-ups and services to upskill marketing, product or cross discipline team from larger enterprises. 

Mr Uhlhorn said most businesses did not know where to begin and his academy was there to show them how to manage it.

He said customer experience stands on the shoulders of marketing and “provides a much more human centred approach to marketing and affiliated services”.

“Part of the problem is companies don’t know how to do it which is why we are feeling there is a very significant gap in the strategy and research piece,” Mr Uhlhorn told Talking Business.

“We focus on five key areas: we have brand experience, intimate understanding of customer, systems, processes and people, accountability and incorporating that into a systematic feedback loop to ensure your business remains customer centric as your business changes.”

THE EXPERIENCE ECONOMY

Mr Uhlhorn said this focus on the five key areas was the framework his company had put together as companies transition into what he called the “experience economy”.

He said the mid-market was the CX Academy’s sweet spot. It will work with challenged brands.

“We won’t work with the big four banks, we’ll work with the fifth,” Mr Uhlhorn said.

He said his company looked at sectors where there was no clear market leader and businesses had a single digit percentage of market share. This allows companies to come in and learn how to differentiate themselves in the market.

The CX Academy also attracts a lot of start-ups.

Mr Uhlhorn said a quarter of the time is spent working with start-ups, including bootstrap start-ups. 

“We don’t make money doing that,’’ he said.

“We do it because it keeps our ear to the ground in terms of the most effective way to shake the market up. We treat that as an R&D exercise.”

www.tinycx.com

www.leongettler.com

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness. 

By Margie Hartley >>

WITHOUT QUESTION corporate Australia is currently collectively belt tightening and, with that, spending on the non-essentials like ‘leadership development’ and ‘team offsites’ are often the first to be cut.

Team days can have a poor reputation as either boring ‘love-ins’ or as one government sector client claimed, “a chance to run around with ice buckets on our heads”.

To be honest, when these team off-sites are done badly this is in fact an accurate, cynical yet honest assessment. So, it would seem obvious and even sensible to cut team days from the budget or at least limit the time we spend on them when times are tight. 

In fact, we should be doing the complete opposite.

To succeed in a changing and competitive global economy, organisations and their leadership teams must have a deadly clear purpose and a crisply defined ambition for their team. They need agreed values and behaviours and ways of getting things done as well as a collective agreement of the goals and priorities. They need to communicate with respectful challenge constantly and be deliberate in every move.

This is a lot to ask of a group of people who have been placed together by an organisation and who inevitably have different working styles, personal values and ways of achieving results.

To help people perform at their best together it is important to prioritise with time, discipline and money, the deliberate development of teams.

Evidence shows that when done well, team off-sites will give the greatest uplift in your team’s collective performance and if it is the most senior leadership team then it will have a dramatic improved impact on the organisation’s bottom line.

But how? To excel in a complex and uncertain business environment, people need to both achieve and learn together. For a team to be effective they need to work on two important components, clarity and connection.

TEAM CLARITY

Teams must have clarity on their ambition, purpose, goals and priorities. They need to know:

• Why they come together;
• What they are there to do and;
• How they do it together.

Great teams consistently strive for clarity even though some ambiguity always exists.

As Google discovered in their five year quest for the perfect team with Project Aristotle, perhaps the most important clarity is how we work and behave together. This is the fundamental heartbeat of a team.

Finding your norms cannot be done in isolation or via email. It requires a structured and professional approach.

Nor will it happen overnight. The process is as important as the result.

Developing the heartbeat of the team takes time and effort and should be revisited often and with a critical eye.

TEAM CONNECTION

With advanced technology, flexible working arrangements, speed of work and geographically dispersed teams, disconnection in teams can occur very quickly. When teams don’t connect they often start to look like federated silos of individuals who only come together occasionally under the guise of a ‘meeting’.

Connection is so much more than coming together in a meeting environment. It’s clear and consistent communication, knowledge sharing, collaboration, genuine care and peer coaching.

Connection is about having quality conversations that promote optimal functioning.

So let me ask you ... are you clear on how and when you connect as a team? Are you trading off team connection for budget and time savings? Are you deliberate in the way you maintain the relationships across your team?

Clarity and connection are two simple to remember, yet very powerful elements to achieving a high performance team.

Neglecting the health of teams is simply not worth the perceived budget savings. Great leaders are never tempted to neglect their teams because they know the health of their organisation is at stake. 

Executive coach and founder of Gram Consulting Group, Margie Hartley, has launched a 14-part podcast series called Fast Track: Career Conversations with Margie Hartley. As an executive coach to 11 of the top 20 ASX-listed companies, Ms Hartley’s latest podcast focuses on the realities of career progression and includes career insights from some of Australia’s top CEOs and business leaders on how to overcome challenges and fast track your career. A new short-and-sharp 15-20 minute episode will drop each Tuesday. Visit www.podcastone.com.au.

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By Bruce Stronge >>

HIRE good people and place them in roles that play to their skills and strengths. Sounds like common sense, right? Bakers bake; designers design; and fitness trainers train.

Far too often, though, staff find themselves shoehorned into positions that don’t fit, placed on career paths that don’t lead to their end goal and tasked with jobs that fall outside their areas of specialisation.

Take, as an example, the successful 12RND fitness franchise.

Business is booming and they’re welcoming new franchisees at a growing rate.

Even with the support afforded by a franchise model, it can still feel daunting to build a new business from scratch.

12RND acknowledges this and uses Outfit to pull together launch kits with all the marketing and branding material new franchisees need.

Most of these franchisees are fitness instructors and personal trainers with little idea of how to engage a marketing agency or produce their own campaigns from scratch. 

12RND automates everything – it now takes only 10 minutes to launch the marketing for a new franchise – so owners can focus on what they’re talented in and that’s fitness and training.

When you look at the DNA of successful small businesses – be it a local gym or a tech startup with a global footprint – you’ll see the importance placed on organising teams and implementing frameworks so staff can self-manage and play to their strengths.

On this last point, there are incredible gains to be made when businesses let good people apply their unique know-how and follow their passions to investigate and innovate.

Staff should be encouraged to experiment and to trial new and better ways to do things, even if this occasionally ends in failure.

Sometimes the only outcome from experimentation is the absolute assurance that something can’t be done, but even that can be spun as a positive result.

LEAD BY EXAMPLE

Innovation needs to come from the top down and business leaders and owners need to lead by example.

The idea for Outfit – a cloud-based platform to automate the production of digital and print marketing materials – was conceived at a ‘hack day’ I held at my software consulting business, NetEngine.

It was the result of letting good people tap into their specialist skill set to innovate, create and experiment over beers on a Friday.

Outfit, in turn, lets design teams focus on designing, creating and innovating by removing the need for menial, monotonous and repetitive tasks.

Like 12RND and its team of talented trainers, so many businesses employ smart, talented designers and then, by necessity, have them spend most of their day on Photoshop, resizing images rather than focusing on the thing they are trained and talented in, and that’s being creative.

That ethos flows into the reason we built Outfit: to help employers reap the benefits of encouraging and channelling staff into their areas of speciality.

Often, business owners feel overwhelmed by the work they think is needed to transform their business, the budget required to innovate, and the time needed to structure teams so every member is playing to their individual strengths.

It doesn’t have to be a daunting task and sharing a company’s vision and business goals with staff is a sure-fire way to inspire them: transparency engenders trust and loyalty.

From an employer’s perspective, share plans and visions, thoughts and ideas, even business costs and revenue details with staff.

In turn, encourage team members to share their own passions, interests and ultimate career goals and empower them to suggest how they can best utilise their skills and specialities.

Even if now is not the optimum time to experiment or take a risk, make innovation and evolution a priority and share ideas with your team so they realise its importance and are perhaps inspired to develop their own ideas and solutions.

Sometimes they’ll surprise you!

https://outfit.io

Bruce Stronge is the founder and CEO of Outfit, the brand automation and marketing production platform transforming how businesses and agencies large and small create, collaborate, localise and distribute brand assets. More than 1,200 clients from across 40 countries use Outfit to reduce production costs, streamline workflow, allow for better team collaboration and accelerate campaign launches while guaranteeing brand consistency.