Natalie is Head of HR for LIWA Trading and has worked in the UAE for over 20 years.
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Having come through a few challenging years and looking at how things have changed because of the pandemic, two critical elements come into focus quite quickly for me: resourcefulness and the concept of autophagy. They may seem like two unrelated topics, and you may be thinking, how exactly do they apply to the business setting? Well, let me explain.
When I say resourcefulness, I mean it in all aspects of the word, and I see it as a skill that we learn from childhood and develop as we age. In the traditional sense, this is recycling, repurposing and upcycling of goods, but it is also adaptability, creativity, innovation, knowledge sharing and persistence.
At its heart, you do the best with what you have. I would define a resourceful person as someone who thinks creatively, is resilient and collaborative, has a growth mindset and always demonstrates a problem-solving attitude. They face obstacles with optimism and make the best of what they have at hand.
We all know at least one person who tackled projects at home during the work-from-home period in the pandemic, opting to do things themselves instead of hiring someone. For whatever reason, they gave it a go. Some were successful, others not so much, but it was a learning experience that added skills to their repertoire that weren’t there before.
Then there were the working parents who were balancing online teams and Zoom calls while homeschooling their children. There were partners working from home trying to balance their shared space. These situations proved to not be easy. We had to be resourceful in terms of managing time, energy and space just to be to complete the tasks of each day. Some people were better at it than others and really flexed their resourcefulness muscle using the skills of problem-solving and resilience.
In the work setting, we all experienced unprecedented scenarios with lockdowns and strict Covid protocols. While things were moving fast, most of us had to find a new way to work. On top of this, as HR professionals, we were expected to provide clear internal communication even in times of ambiguity, find creative solutions to situations that impacted pay, make sure there was compliance with protocols and ensure the overall well-being of our employees (and their families).
We needed to be resourceful in every scenario.
The second topic that came to mind is autophagy. According to a piece from the Cut, “The basic idea behind autophagy is that in the absence of external sources of food, the body begins to eat itself (auto: self, phage: eat), destroying and recycling its own damaged cell bits and proteins, so that new and healthy versions can be built.”
Now how does this physiological process link to resourcefulness and the business setting?
If you look back to the generic situations referenced above, many of these had to be done with limited external support/information:
• Doing home improvements/projects
• Homeschooling and/or balancing space with partners also working from home
• Generating creative solutions for communication, pay and well-being in the workplace
With the exception of maybe some YouTube “how-to” videos for the improvement projects, we largely had to create new ways of working. We had to end (destroy) activities and processes that were not adding value and redeploy (recycle) resources to the ones that were. This is practical autophagy in a business setting, and we were doing it during the pandemic because we had to be resourceful.
Thinking back over the past 24 months, do you think you have become more or less resourceful? And if you have been resourceful, will you continue to be?
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