[00:00:00] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: In an uncertain economic and political climate. How resilient will your workplace be when crisis strikes? And are rigid workplace rules actually harming your business? In this week’s episode, Speaker and business advisor Bronwyn Reid explains how businesses can better prepare for disruption. Sharing practical lessons in crisis proofing your business. Then CEO of HR consulting business Shilo People, Ilona Charles explains how leaders can balance boundaries, communication and flexibility in modern workplaces. From SoundCartel, I’m Grace Jennings-Edquist, and this is Business Essentials.
Lessons in crisis-proofing your business
Our first guest is Bronwyn Reid. She’s a speaker as well as founder and director of an environmental company and also small company. Big business When crisis hits, some businesses adapt quickly while others struggle to cope. Bronwyn says resilience comes down to leadership, preparation and practical systems, not paperwork or jargon. She joins me to share some simple, actionable ways small businesses can start crisis proofing before the next disruption arrives. I kicked off the interview by asking Bronwyn, when a crisis hits a business, what does it often reveal about that business’s leadership and systems?
[00:01:28] Bronwyn Reid: I would like to just preface my answer to that question with just a couple of items. One is I am very anti the what I call the risk industry, which has given us the jargon and the acronyms, which in my opinion, turns a lot of small business owners off risk management in the first place. So I’m not a risk management professional who talks in acronyms. I believe that this is an important subject for small business owners, particularly because by nature we are optimists. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be studying our own business in the first place. So by nature, we’re optimists. So we have this. Well, probably not going to happen to me attitude. The third thing that’s really important is that crises don’t create problems. This is really important for people to understand. They don’t create problems. They expose what is already a problem there. So in directly answering your question, when a crisis hits, there’s two things that get revealed. And this goes back to the name of the podcast Business Essentials. One is the quality of leadership. Have decisions been made deliberately? Have they been made on time? Have those decisions been based on hope? Not any evidence or research. So that’s number one. Number two is the presence or absence of good systems. Now, a lot of businesses have got paper systems that they’re in a shelf somewhere in the office, or they’re stored in Google Drive somewhere, but they’re not practical. They’re not grounded in reality. They’re not used every single day.
[00:03:17] Bronwyn Reid: Now, when a crisis hits, you will fail down to the level of your systems. Hope is not a survival strategy, and quite frankly, tears aren’t either. So you’ve really got to have that leadership and that decision making and those systems in place before you start. Now, I love going to the Antarctic and the Arctic. I’m about to embark on my third trip now in the Arctic. They’re very careful about polar bears, of course, because polar bears can kill. And I had one experience where we were all unloaded off onto the shore, and one of the guides or the spotters had spotted a polar bear a kilometer away, so he put out the alarm. We all went to the boats and loaded up quickly and got out of there. Now, clearly, that tour company is very cognizant of the risk of having a polar bear in the vicinity. So everything was organized right down to the last second. Now, I actually asked one of the guides, are we just acting out of an abundance of caution or is this real? And he said, no, this is real. This is real. So what that showed to me is that that company had everything in place. They had the stakeout guides. They are equipped with rifles. They had the radios. Every guide knew exactly what to do to get us off the land and into those Zodiacs safely and get out of harm’s way. And we didn’t actually get to see the polar bear.
[00:04:55] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: So, Bronwyn, from your work with Australian SMEs, what are some early warning signs that a business isn’t as resilient as the owner might think?
[00:05:03] Bronwyn Reid: Ah, that’s an excellent question. In my experience, there’s two ways to find this out. One is observation. So when you literally work with the business, or if you were, say, a professional advisor to that business, just observing what’s happening. One of the biggest giveaways is there’s one person making all the decisions, you know, the founder of the business who hasn’t managed to let go and allow somebody else to make a decision. When you have that, you’re doing several things and they’re all risky. The other thing that you may observe in that situation is what’s known as normalized deviance, where what everyone knows should happen or knows is safe doesn’t happen. You know, in that example with the polar bear, if the guides had said, oh, he’s a kilometer away yet, you know, we won’t really bother, We’ll all just have a little look around here for a while. First know a polar bear can run extraordinarily fast, but that would be a symptom of normalized deviance, where we we just don’t quite implement what we’re supposed to be implementing. And you see it all the time. So that’s the first one. The second thing you will find out by asking, just by asking people. So if you’ve got that one leader who thinks everything’s okay, but everyone else in the team is like a duck, you know, their feet are paddling like mad underneath just to keep the whole place running.
[00:06:32] Bronwyn Reid: If there’s financial pressure that isn’t being addressed. The other thing is you need to start looking at all the risks now. We as Australians, we’re used to fires, floods, cyclones, those things. And that’s what we think of when we think of risk management. But there’s so much else. 1 in 3 marriages end in divorce. So if you’re in business with your partner as I am. You got a 1 in 3 chance of things going haywire. You’ve got a 1 in 3 chance of making an insurance claim at some point. I’ve actually got some great stats on. If you have two partners in the business, what are the chances of one of those partners dying before 65, and what are the chances of that partner having a a life threatening event before age 65? Now, if you get up to six partners in a business, you’ve got an 82% chance of something going wrong with one of the partners before they reach 65. Have you taken that into account? Have you got plans? Continuation plans. So risks come in. I use 12 categories and I have been added as a category. So that’s probably the biggest thing I see that people just don’t think about is thinking about all those other unusual risks.
[00:07:55] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: So what are two or three practical steps business leaders can take today to start crisis proofing their business before the next disruption arrives? I’m sure a lot of listeners are going, wow, I need to do something about this. What can they actually do to get started?
[00:08:09] Bronwyn Reid: Okay, step one is overcome the overwhelm. Do not think that you have to deal in all the acronyms and the 10,000 pieces of paper and the, you know, I’ve worked with corporates and they do what I call a risk management by the kilo. Just, you know, the more paper you have, the safer you must be. No, that is not the case. So don’t be fearful. Get over the overwhelm. The best place to start to is just brainstorming with your business, whether it’s just you and your business partner or your team or whatever, and start looking in those non-obvious places first. Yes, go back to basics. Have you got insurance cover for all the appropriate insurances If you live in Cairns, there is a time when you are going to be hit by a cyclone. Do you have evacuation plans? Do you have backup plans for your it? This is not rocket science to start with the absolute basics and then start looking and really looking in those non-obvious places.
[00:09:16] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: I wonder, Bronwyn, you’ve worked with so many businesses. Can you share a real example of an Australian SME that has successfully navigated a crisis, and what they did differently that others can learn from?
[00:09:29] Bronwyn Reid: I’m going to be a little bit disingenuous here and share an instance from my own company. Apart from the writing and the speaking and mentoring that I do, I’m actually an active director of a 30 year old environmental management company. And in 2008, our premises were threatened by floodwaters. Now you may say, oh, well, it’s okay. It’s easy for you. You’re an environmental company. You know what’s happening. But all the data that we relied upon is publicly available. And even if you have trouble that there’s local councils that have offices that can help you when you with the elevations, that when the flood reached X level at X point, we had to do something. So 48 hours prior to the flood reaching us, we had packed up everything in the office. We had put it all in safety and the water flooded through the office. And 24 hours later we went back with the hoses and started washing things out. Now again, I say, you might say, yeah, well, that’s easy for you because you own an environmental company. But all of that data is publicly available. So to be shocked when a flood arrives on your doorstep, we’ve had enough experience with floods now to know that they come and they go. And yes, they are a bit different every single time because houses get built and bridges get built. But on the whole, you can have a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Fires? Not so much.
[00:11:07] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: Yes. Before I let you go, you’ve shared some great tips today. Are there any other key lessons that you think small business owners should know about? About how to crisis proof their business?
[00:11:18] Bronwyn Reid: Well, we are living through one right now, aren’t we? Um, you and I didn’t cause this. No one in Australia caused this, but we’re all getting the collateral damage. No, we all can’t prepare for every single crisis. But as I said, if you’ve done some thinking, you are a long way ahead of a lot of other people. I talk about this circle of control. It’s no use getting stressed and head up about the things that you can’t control. What you have to do is concentrate your mind on the things that you can control. Can we move our people to higher ground? Can we move our cattle to higher ground? Whatever it may be, AI and cyber hacking is a really great example. Remember that once. Once it hits, you have no time to think. You can’t make proper decisions. So any prep is good prep and it doesn’t have to be difficult.
[00:12:14] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: That was Bronwyn Reid. She’s a speaker, founder, director and author.
Right to disconnect: Are you killing flexibility?
Now to the Right to Disconnect, which became law for Australian employees of small businesses in August 2025. While there has been a drop in unpaid overtime since the right was introduced, research from the centre for Future Work suggests that employees are still working the equivalent of five extra weeks a year unpaid, which is blurring the lines between work and personal time. So while the intent is to protect workers, some businesses may be responding in ways that actually undermine flexibility. Ilona Charles is CEO and co-founder of HR consulting business Shilo. Ilona says the real issue isn’t after hours communication. It’s unclear expectations. Nicole Goodman started the interview by asking Ilona, are businesses misunderstanding what the right to disconnect actually means?
[00:13:12] Ilona Charles: I think in practice, what we’re probably seeing is that a lot of businesses have overreacted initially and that, oh my God, you know, another law that we need to abide by and sort of overcorrected instead of taking perhaps a more human approach and setting just some clear expectations around what is reasonable, what is not reasonable, you know, and not banning contact entirely. I think, if that makes sense. You know, I think a lot of businesses were quite worried. That means we can’t even ring someone, you know, after 5:00. It’s not that simple and it’s not that binary. I think if there’s rigid rules in place or the business puts rigid rules in place, then people will still feel that pressure, rather than there being a more flexible sort of way of how you make these decisions around when you disconnect and when you don’t.
[00:13:58] Nicole Goodman: So why do blanket kind of clock on, clock off rules actually undermine flexibility than support it? Talk a little bit more about that if you can.
[00:14:07] Ilona Charles: Yeah. Not all roles are the same. So, you know, depending on the organization, even if it’s a small organization, everyone has different roles, different responsibilities. You know, a one size fits all just doesn’t necessarily work unless everyone is doing exactly the same job, which is rare, I think in startups and scale ups, particularly, you know, work often happens in bursts. It happens a bit more sporadically. It’s not neat. It’s not necessarily in a 9 to 5 block. So I think the rigid rules tend to remove that autonomy where the person has some control over how they work and when they work, and it can actually slow things down for those who value the flexibility the most. So people will end up working towards the rules rather than actually feeling trusted to manage their own time in the context of the work that they do. I think that’s where it has the reverse effect, unfortunately.
[00:14:58] Nicole Goodman: With that in mind, then, how should organizations define what’s urgent, what can wait, and what reasonable really looks like?
[00:15:07] Ilona Charles: I might just start with the urgent one, because I think what urgent means is that it should be genuinely time critical, not just someone else’s preference for when they want to work. I think I’ve grown up a lot in corporate life and everything is urgent all the time, and that is just not true. Yeah, it’s just not true. So I think it starts probably with role clarity. And once again, you know, we come back to the leaders in the organization or the managers. It’s really sitting down with the individuals, the individual employees and saying, what is your role require? You know, what are the sort of times that are reasonable for you, reasonable for what the job requires, and then what truly is urgent and maybe providing some examples of what urgent looks like. So rather than it being sort of some nebulous statements around, we’ll only call you when it’s urgent. If everyone has a slightly different perspective of what urgent is, then it’s still not going to work very well. So I think using some real life examples in the context of the work that’s being done is super helpful. And I know it sounds really easy, but so often we just don’t give that practical sort of guidance around what is urgent. And so many things are not urgent really, to be honest.
[00:16:16] Nicole Goodman: Exactly. So what does a well-designed system like core hours plus flexibility actually look like in the real workplace?
[00:16:26] Ilona Charles: I think it will be different depending on organizations and what they work on. And once again, the type of work that they’re doing. But I guess a well-designed system is where you have an agreement in place. Once again, it doesn’t need to be a formal, you know, formal big document. It just needs to be an agreement of what are the core hours. And now for some, that might be the traditional 9 to 5. Five. A lot don’t work those hours anymore. But if you take retail or you know, a lot do work 9 to 5, and that might be your agreed core hours. And then maybe there’s a time around that where you’re available for collaboration or for some after hour discussion. So it might be an hour each side if you’re a 9 to 5. Whereas if you take the sort of tech industry, for example, where they work in a much more agile sort of, you know, product development based approach, their core hours might be smaller, but there might be a lot more flexibility each side of it. And particularly if they’re working, you know, into global or other time zone jurisdictions, it might be that you need to agree. Well, what’s reasonable and what’s not around those time zones, for example. So it’s really agreeing what are the core hours? And then what do we think is reasonable around that to be able to talk to each other and for what purpose?
[00:17:37] Nicole Goodman: Yeah, it’s more about really taking a logical approach than implementing anything that’s very hard and fast.
[00:17:44] Ilona Charles: I think. So I think there needs to be some flex. The other thing I’d say around that, just thinking it through is the management or the leaders in the organization do need to role model boundaries as well. You know, it brings me back actually, you know, to the old days where we talked about work life balance, you know, that it’s still along the same vein. You know, if you as a leader in don’t mind working after hours, but, you know, you take your kids to school in a day or, you know, there might be something like that. The people who report to you and who work for you will follow your lead. But if they don’t know that you’re taking the kids to school and that’s why you’re working after hours, they just think you’re working, you know, 15, 16 hour days, then they’ll feel that’s what they have to do to get ahead. So it’s really important that the leaders in the organization, no matter what leadership level, are demonstrating and those boundaries setting as well, and not just sort of, you know, do as I say, not as I do approach.
[00:18:41] Nicole Goodman: Yeah. Leading from the top. Absolutely. As we wrap up, if we think about business owners in particular, what’s one practical shift they can make immediately to get the balance right?
[00:18:53] Ilona Charles: Yeah. Look, I think it’s tough for business owners. They’ve got so much on their plate. This just probably feels like an added thing they have to deal with. But it doesn’t have to be complex. I think depending on the size of your organization, if it’s just you and some employees, you know, sit down with the employees, either as a group, as individually define what urgent means for them and for you. What does it actually mean for your business? I think if you’ve got a leadership structure in place, then do that with your leadership. And then they do that with their employees. So, you know, I think it depends on the size of the company, but just write it down, talk it through, make sure you’re all on the same page. I think it is worth writing it down just after that conversation, because so often we come out of conversations, we all do, and we’ve both heard completely different things. So just write it down, make sure you’re all in agreement. And just taking that one step, I think will be a big step forward both to, you know, reduce confusion, Avoid you. Compliance risk and just provide that clarity that your team needs and that you need. And yeah, I think that’s it’s very practical. Shouldn’t take too long. Might be a little bit of back and forth if you don’t agree, but it shouldn’t be too hard.
[00:20:01] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: That was Ilona Charles, CEO and co-founder of HR consulting business, Shilo. Thanks for joining us for this week’s episode. Follow Business Essentials Podcast across social media and head to www.BusinessEssentialsPodcast.au for more. Business Essentials is a SoundCartel podcast. Producers are Nick Schildberger, Nicole Goodman and myself. Technical production is by Pete Letts. I’m Grace Jennings-Edquist thanks for listening. We’ll bring you more business essentials next week.
