**Abstract**

HRM professionals' reliance on using teamwork, organisational planning and managerially- controlled appraisal measures within the framework of High Performance Organisation (HPO) and High Performance Work Systems (HPWS) has outlived its useful applicability and sustainability in today's SME crisis-ridden environment. This chapter highlights the gap between the HRM discipline, whose measures to resolve the organisational performance problem have instead resulted in a deepening of the performance crisis in resource-constrained SMEs and an urgent need to address such a fundamental problem through the creation, development and sustenance of more innovative measures. A critique of HPO and HPWS's structural and systemic approach to solve the effective organisational performance implementation gap led to an additional discovery, which is how to solve the performance problem competently and sustainably such that SMEs have a more strategically viable future. The study's interpretivism paradigm backed up by a survey of 85 management and staff respondents in a longitudinal study spanning 7 years in the UK highlighted 6 important themes. These were combined to develop a new 'Strategic Workforce Resilience Management Model' as a way to solve the SME performance quagmire. This fills the performance implementation and strategic sustainability gaps and introduces resilience characteristics into the way HRM professionals should be managing the performance problem. The limitations, the implications and future research areas are discussed.

**Keywords:** HRM, performance, management, staff, resilience, model
