Building Business Resiliency with Anita Grantham

Driving resilience in your organization starts with your company values, your employee retention strategy, and your own resilience as an HR leader. In the first episode of our series, “Building Business Resiliency with Anita Grantham,” Anita Grantham, Head of HR at BambooHR, discusses tips, tricks, and best practices for HR leaders to improve resilience in themselves and their organizations. To watch the complete first episode, click here.

Resilience isn’t a new topic for Anita. Her resume includes businesses of all sizes, from her own startup to her last stop at Pluralsight (a company with over 2,000 employees). Anita is passionate about helping people drive success in all types of workplaces. She shared, “I really love small and medium-sized businesses. I’ve owned my own small business. I’ve had to make payroll. I’ve had to sell a business. I think my real passion is helping small businesses succeed and helping people enjoy their work.”

In this episode, Anita shared her advice for HR leaders ready to build resilience. Here are three key takeaways from the discussion:

1. Change is a necessary competency.

With a recession looming, the topics of change and risk are now everyday concerns. And that’s quite a shift from what the market was experiencing just six months ago. “It feels to me like a little bit of whiplash. Where we go from…hire everybody that you can…Wait, you can’t hire them because they’re all resigning. Now, wait [again], don’t hire them because we’ve got to cut costs and now we’re laying people off,” said Anita. And with many in the workforce experiencing this kind of change for the first time, Anita reminded us that, “We can help our team members understand what it’s like to go through a time like this. What it means. What it doesn’t mean. And how to focus on the things we can control.”

“It’s a pretty necessary competency to be able to go with change and to stay within a real vein of calm where your customers or your team members don’t see real high highs from you or real low lows from you.”
–Anita Grantham

Anita advises HR professionals to stop focusing on the things we can’t control that “often take up a lot of airtime in our brain.” Instead, our role as leaders in the business is to get really comfortable with change.

Anita’s tip: Build resilience by staying balanced—help your team members and customers stay prepared during the best times while staying hopeful during the worst.

2. Infuse resilience in your company values.

“Resilience is what you make of the situation, it’s how you lead through it. It’s the reaction. It’s that pause between action, pause, reaction. It’s that pause part to say “Who am I going to be?” before I react and how does it line up with the values and mission of the organization?”

–Anita Grantham

If you want resilience at your organization, start with your company values. Anita shared several BambooHR values that drive resilience for employees and the organization as a whole. Those values include: Lead from Where You Are, Do the Right Thing, Be Open, and Assume the Best. Values like these can help employees and leaders react to situations with resilience individually and as a group.

For example, by instilling the Lead from Where You Are value, employees are encouraged to share feedback with their managers and speak up when they notice opportunities for improvement.

Anita’s tip: Build resilience by reevaluating your company values.

3. Start having “stay” conversations.

“We talk about customer retention. And team member retention is the number one way to retain your customers. When your team members can see the impact they have on the customer, and they feel like they’re making a difference, that goes a long way.”

–Anita Grantham

“Retain our best people. Full stop.” Anita shared this best practice as she discussed the importance of retaining key employees. “Customers want to work with team members that have been there. They want to see that stability,” said Anita. The employee experience drives the customer experience. To tie that together, you have to start by helping your employees see how they make a difference to customers. Understanding their impact can keep employees in their role.

Anita’s tip: Build resilience by helping your employees see their impact on the customer experience.

Watch the entire recorded session here, and don’t forget—this new series is focused on more than resilience. It’s focused on building an HR leadership community. Attendees are encouraged to join with cameras on, interact in the chat, and ask questions during the live event. Join our next live session by registering here.