Steps to Prepare your Business for Any Crisis or Disaster in 2023
These days it feels like we can't go a week without another massive emergency or disaster, from shootings at grocery stores and Fourth of July parades to people getting trampled at concerts to unprecedented natural disasters across the country, week after week. More emergencies and disasters are happening, and those occurring are more severe than they used to be. If we consider our new environmental reality, the only way for businesses to thrive and consistently function in our modern age is to prepare for these new realities intentionally.
Creating a Culture of Preparedness
Preparing for the inevitable can feel like a daunting task to most. After all, each business is unique, and each emergency presents novel challenges. How can one possibly prepare for all possible scenarios? The answer lies in building a culture of preparedness within an organization.
A culture of preparedness is created by taking proactive steps. By assessing the most likely risks; identifying critical business functions; and maintaining an adequately trained workforce, ensuring a business continues to run as smoothly as possible through even the most unexpected events.
Organizations looking to maximize uptime and minimize losses during a disaster must meet national best practices for emergency preparedness and business continuity planning. By following five essential steps, every business can be better prepared for a crisis or disaster in 2023:
01. Understand Unique Internal And External Threats And Hazards
The first step in any organization's journey in preparedness is to get a firm grasp of the most likely threats and hazards it faces. Understanding an organization's threat landscape and comparing its capabilities to the standard illustrate opportunities to mitigate risk. These can be regional (e.g., hurricanes, blizzards, wildfires), industry-specific (e.g., risks from hazardous materials, supply chain vulnerabilities), and even more general threats that all organizations face in today's world (e.g., pandemic, active shooter, cyber-attack on critical infrastructure). Understanding threat landscapes at an organizational level is a crucial first step that forms the foundation for strategic planning needed to determine how the organization would like to react to each threat or hazard that comes its way.
02. Plan A Strategic Response
Once the unique threats and hazards facing an organization are documented, there is an opportunity to plan strategically to lessen the impacts of those potential disruptions. In emergency management, we work to reduce a disaster's or emergency's effects by determining and documenting our course of action before the incident occurs. The document that houses the strategic plan is also known as an Emergency Operations Plan (EOP), details the real action needed by an organization to ensure that an organization’s critical business functions are sustained at all times or resumed as soon as possible after a disruption.
A critical business function is any function in a business that is essential to keeping the organization in business. For example, ensuring the safety of employees, visitors, and guests, running payroll, and communicating with clients about delays or outages are standard critical business functions. On the other hand, business development and professional development may not qualify as essential when an organization is experiencing the impacts of a disaster or emergency. Identifying each organization's unique critical business functions requires a facilitated discussion amongst senior leadership to surface the most critical functions and only those needed to sustain the business.
Once Critical Business Functions are identified, they are documented in an EOP. For example, suppose payroll is a critical business function. In that case, directions for running payroll and guidance for executing the task (like stating that last week's payroll should be re-run vs. another approach) should be documented. At the same time, it is equally important to ensure that sensitive information, like usernames, passwords, entire account numbers, etc., are only visible to those individuals pre-identified to execute these tasks and on a need-to-know basis.
03. Staff Cross Training to Ensure Strategic Response
It is essential to have staff members who are not traditionally responsible for the critical business function trained to support them. Staff cross-training ensures the activities required by an organization's critical business functions are sustained at all times or resumed as soon as possible after a disruption. If payroll is a critical business function, there should be individuals outside the finance department who know how to execute this task and know their responsibilities to do this during a disaster or emergency. This approach ensures that no matter the impacts an organization from disasters or emergencies occurring locally, regionally, nationally, or internationally there are trained staff on a team ready to ensure the core activities that make the business a business continue with minimal interruption.
04. Participate in scenario-driven discussion-based learning events/exercises
Known as table-top exercises or war games, discussion-based learning events are critical in building a culture of preparedness. Emergency Managers use the term table-top exercise, which describes a learning event built around a scenario that focuses on the unique-to-each business decisions needed in the moment to manage a disaster or emergency actively. The scenario highlights how a slight deviation from normal behavior can spiral into a massive emergency or disaster even when the best course of action is taken at every turn. There are two major benefits of participating in a table-top exercise.
Participating in a table-top exercise allows a glimpse into the type of decision-making needed without the pressure or urgency of a real-world event. The opportunity to expose senior decision-makers to decision-making in a similar but discussion-based and simulated disaster or emergency is invaluable. In an emergency or disaster, there needs to be active management of the situation, characterized by unconventional leadership behaviors; active and urgent decision-making with little to no opportunity for revision without massive negative impacts. Using the Emergency Preparedness Plan/Emergency Operations Plan the organization has developed, there is a guide, almost a script of what is supposed to happen, and a team of individuals ready to implement when instructed. These are different from the conditions most people operate under, but they are essential to successfully managing a disaster or emergency.
The second major value added by participating in a table-top exercise is that it illuminates gaps in the plan and leads to. There will always be opportunities for improvement, and usually, these can be found during the facilitated discussion that is a table-top exercise. For example, assumptions may be made between departments about what types of documents another department can produce quickly, or simply a document does not exist and needs to be developed to support the Emergency Operations Plan/Emergency Preparedness Plan.
05. Maintain the Capacity for Resilience
Once preparedness capacity is developed within organization, it is essential to maintain these skills and ensure the EOP aligns with the organization's goals. As staff turnover occurs, it is critical to revise the Emergency Operations Plan/Emergency Preparedness Plan, staff training, and table-top exercises to ensure all staff members are familiar with their roles and responsibilities and can implement them under any conditions.
The Art of Emergency Management
The preceding five steps illustrate the actions needed to prepare an organization to navigate any disaster or emergency that may come its way. While this may seem overwhelming, the activities become more tangible and achievable when the steps are broken down into sub-projects and tasks. Much of what is needed to prepare an organization is already housed somewhere; the art of Emergency Management is knowing how to find the information and ask the right questions to most efficiently surface the organization's intent when strategically responding to a disaster or emergency. In today's world, we have yet to learn what may be coming our way. Taking the extra step to prepare a business can be the difference between survival and failure in the face of ever-frequent and growingly severe disasters and emergencies.