Anyone still in business in SA today will have experienced the agony and ecstasy of leading a team and staying afloat. The most pressing, most obvious crisis every business faces is the collapsing national grid. But, as we also well know, in a world changing by the minute innumerable new challenges and crises mean many businesses are terminal and just don’t know it yet.
This year looks set to be the year human capital faces its biggest tests yet. A business that fails to value its people, consider their capacity for resilience and guard against the loss of critical skills will quickly sink to a tragic end. A vastly underestimated threat concerns a business’s key decision makers. Kidnapping in SA is at its highest rate ever.
The secret to business continuity planning is that deliberate and proactive work should be actioned months in advance — and right now all businesses should be considering whether the absence of any key person can be tolerated for any reason, for any length of time.
Looking beyond critical skills, employees across the board are increasingly disillusioned with capital’s traditional extractive approach to employment and labour. Organised labour in particular is driving increasingly harder bargains in wage negotiations. Locally, frequent flashes of labour unrest on farms, at factories and in our streets disrupt businesses and government service delivery. This will increase ahead of an election year.