COVID-19 revealed gaps in many organisations' plans
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that companies were not as ready to manage risk as they thought.
“Many organisations thought they would be prepared in the event of a major disruption. However, when reality hit, gaps started appearing, especially in the human areas of planning, as well as having the ability to sustain organisational resilience for a period of time – by that, I mean sharing the focus on not only sustaining the business during disruption, but to keep growing and moving forward,” RiskNZ managing director David Turner said.
He pointed to emergency planning, business continuity and organisational resilience as the most common risk management-related issues faced by companies. Nonetheless, he lauds the response of organisations across various industries to their lack of risk management preparedness.
“There is always a ‘positive’ in a crisis, and the positive here is the newfound interest in adapting to uncertainty and us all improving our approach to risk management. I have always been a firm believer that we need to make risk management an awareness and habit within our organisations – to make risk thinking something we do every day without even fully being aware that we are doing it,” Turner explained.
Many businesses in New Zealand were also able to withstand the blow of the pandemic due to protective measures implemented by the government.
“It will be interesting to see if the industry comes up with an insurance package directly designed to deal with the risk of a pandemic. The COVID-19 experience has shown that there is clearly an insurable risk to look at covering,” McElroys partner Peter Hunt said.
McElroys was among NZ Lawyer’s 5-Star Insurance Law Firms for 2021.
