When it comes to preparing for business continuity, organizations need to remember major events like Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Northeast blackout in 2003, or the 1989 San Francisco-area earthquake, and make sure they are planning an incident whose scope, duration and impact may have been previously unimaginable.
Organizations must take nothing for granted and must make difficult decisions about the assumptions on which their responses are based, while preparing for contingencies with a layered defense to raise their level of preparedness.
Businesses and government organizations that follow these seven tips can improve their disaster preparedness.
Make your people the top priority. The physical safety and psychological well-being of employees should always be the first priority in an organization’s business continuity strategy. This preparation includes clearly defining what precautions a business should take to keep personnel out of harm’s way, what situations would mean the need to shut down, and what people should do and where to go if business is interrupted. It also involves having crisis communication capabilities in place to help ensure a means of informing staff about the situation and their responsibilities, and to enable coordination of the organization’s responses to the event.
Help people to be personally prepared. The more comfortable and prepared staff are with their family situations during an emergency, the more likely they are to be ready to help the business. This means not only helping employees in the workplace, but also helping them with guidance and information to prepare their homes and families. For employees supporting time-critical response activities, an organization could even work with them directly or provide resources to ensure personal and family preparedness.
Don’t wait, pre-prepare what you can. If reports predict that your organization is likely to be affected by a weather-related event, don’t wait until the last 24 hours to take action. To minimize risk, assess potential impacts and, where possible, proactively move personnel out of harm’s way, shift work processes to alternate locations, and move transportable assets early so they are already in a secondary location when the event occurs. event. If you have an alternate location or utility service provider, please inform them of the potential consequences to ensure you are communicating and understand the process for enacting the alternate arrangements you have when you really need them.
Take steps to have people ready to respond. Organizational preparedness requires that personnel be trained and ready to respond to an incident. Companies must focus on communication, awareness and training. A designated response team may conduct scenario-based exercises to help personnel be effective and efficient in their emergency response roles. Organizations need to be so well prepared that they only need a business continuity plan for reference or guidance, not a playbook, when disaster strikes.
Reexamine and realign responsibilities. People and their roles often change in organizations. Review staffing assumptions made during strategy development to determine if they are still valid. For example, if a business has downsized, people may have taken on additional tasks, which could hamper their ability to take on the additional responsibility required in a response plan.
Review your provider list. Ask your suppliers about their business continuity plans to learn their strengths and vulnerabilities. Your readiness depends on your readiness. Look at the geographic diversity of your service providers to see if they have resources available outside of the affected area.
Don’t forget the customers you support. If your organization engages customers in transactional exchanges, review your customer management plan. Examine how your company will communicate its readiness, address potential concerns and restrictions that could affect the customer relationship, and prepare for the potential impacts of downtime or lost customer transactions. This is particularly important if your organization serves customers nationally or globally, where they will not be directly affected and may not anticipate the impact of a disaster on their support and services.
