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By Andrew Fernandes
Your business continuity framework is in place.
Congratulations! You religiously update your calling tree information every quarter. Good job! You meet
with stakeholders once every six months to review their plan input. Fantastic! You conduct a tabletop
exercise at least once a year. Super!
Then your worst nightmare happens. Your business suffers an unexpected incident that causes an unacceptable business interruption. You make the decision to execute your business continuity plan, and you are fully confident your organization is ready to deal with the situation.
Before you do this, stop for a moment and ask yourself two very important questions:
1. Are you really prepared?
2. Can you really take care of your biggest assets - your people?
If you answered no to either of these questions, read on. You need to avoid the seven deadly mistakes of business continuity planning when it comes to your employees. If you answered yes, take a few minutes to discover whether or not you have avoided those same deadly mistakes.
Mistake #1: Assuming your employees will be there to support you
If your recovery plan is heavily dependant on support from people, you can safely assume your employees will be there to support you, right? Wrong!
That assumption could be a fatal decision for your organization. Instead, think and plan for the phenomenon of WIIFM: What's in it for me? If you review incidents other organizations have encountered, the companies that lived to tell their tale are the ones who thought about their people and their needs - WIIFM.
Your management team must be made aware of the BC plan's SWOT (Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats). Every weakness is an opportunity for improvement, and you must address every threat either by accepting the risk or investing the money and/or resources required to mitigate the risk.
Recommendations: Review and obtain formal management sign-off on the SWOT. Also, have your management team make decisions in advance about actions requiring expenditure. Review the following, including:
- Business interruption insurance: What can it do for you?
- The costs of relocation, travel and living expenses.
- Decisions about payroll. Remember the following:
- People work for a reason, but if you want them to work through a disaster, you have to give them the reason.
- Review decisions on paying all employees (including temporary or contract staff) during a period of business interruption for a minimum period of time, generally at least one payroll run. Remember your contract and temporary employees may be your saving grace if you potentially lose full-time employees. If you need to ramp up your business to 100 percent over a period of time, you will need every hand on deck.
- Provide for variable add-on costs as a buffer. Plan for 10 percent over and above your projected costs.
- Document all the decisions you make as part of the executive summary for further review at future management sessions.
- The last but most important part is to communicate your general strategy and message to the employee population: You will be there to support them and their families in the event of a crisis.
End Result: Employees will 'walk the talk,' fully knowing you and the company are there for them.
Mistake # 2: You don't 'walk the talk'
You managed to get your plan documented and got your SWOT signed off. No need to sweat the small stuff, right? Wrong!
If you want your plan to work, you actually need to sweat over the small stuff. This is critical to ensure your plan is executable. Some examples of this include: Food, medical aid, travel and living requirements and monetary support. There is nothing worse than having employees deal with bureaucratic providers who go by the book.
Recommendation: You need to 'walk the talk' by eliminating weaknesses in your plan and converting your opportunities into actions. For example:
- Ensure your medical providers have made arrangements in advance. Ensure people are taken care of and have access to benefits they will truly need at this time.
- Ask if your security providers can give you additional on-site support to protect your assets, including your employees.
- See if you can put any financial arrangements into place in advance.
- Talk to your payroll providers. Do they have the ability to run payroll based on the last payroll upload?
- Look at social support arrangements to assist families who are impacted. Provide support as required. Make arrangements with travel providers.
- Have an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) in place. Ensure your provider has the specialized skills to deal with people-related issues and can actually ramp up support in the event of a generalized incident.
- Check your ability to reach out to employees.
End Result: Actions speak louder than words. People and families will remember if you did the 'small stuff' - and they will certainly remember if the small stuff was never done.
Mistake #3: You don't show employees how the plan will work
Now you know what you are going to do. Great! You can handle downtime, because you have a documented strategy, right? Wrong!
Downtime is relative. You can be down for two hours, two days or two months. However, if your plan can take out the fluff and address needs from an employee perspective, you will have begun the process of ensuring you can truly care for your greatest assets.
Recommendations: As part of your maintenance program, you want to include your employees as well as your medical, security, payroll and EAP in your testing process. Involve all of them in the tabletop exercise. Execute a live test where the various providers can actually demonstrate their capability to support your employees. You want to ensure you can have the relevant forms of support - bereavement counseling, trauma counseling, monetary support, social support and family support - ready if and when your employees ever need them. You are not looking to solve all issues, but the most burning ones that result from a crisis.
End Result: Your employees only want two things. They want to be acknowledged as an asset, not a statistic. And they want to know that if they are willing to participate in supporting your business, you can support them when the chips are down.
Mistake #4: You don't plan to deal with employees first
Your business has redundancy built-in to its plan, so why worry about disasters outside your business? Imagine you had a hurricane sweeping into your city. It brings down the infrastructure and the city is shut down. But you've got your business process all covered, and that's all that matters, right? Wrong!
When an incident happens, the first assessment businesses traditionally do is determine the incident's impact on business processes. But can you execute those processes without people? If a large-scale disaster strikes, employees will naturally want to be taking care of their families - not your business. And if your employees do not believe you will help care for them and their families, your plan is doomed to failure.
Recommendation: Ensure your crisis management team addresses the people issues first. Where are my people? What do I need to do for them? How do I let them know what I am going to do for them and what I want from them? Are there any special employee needs I must address?
Key Result: You gain the ability to show you are in control and that you truly care. This will help you execute your business continuity plan.
Mistake #5: You react rather than 'chat'
Chaos and misinformation are bound to happen during a crisis, so it's okay to be reactive in this situation, right? Wrong!
Any incident, however small, will cause chaos, misinformation and reaction, and sometimes people will take the wrong actions. But if you think about it, the one and only thing an organization must do right is communicate. Your organization's primary responsibility is to ensure your employees are confident you can provide them with the most up-to-date information first-hand.
Recommendation: Set up a toll-free hotline so your employees can call in for regular updates. This way, you can provide consistent messaging. For large enterprises, look for automated notification solutions you can either build in-house or source externally.
Key Result: You will have the ability to eliminate second-hand information and employee guesswork, both of which can be extremely detrimental to morale and employees after an incident.
Mistake #6: You don't soothe and calm your employees
Your employees know the numbers of your EAP, so you can just let them reach out if and when they are ready. After all, you have more important things to take care of, like getting your infrastructure up and running, right? Wrong.
One of the greatest impacts of any incident is the varying degree of trauma an employee might experience. You can't plan for everything, but you can plan to have expert resources available.
Recommendations: Ensure you have an EAP in place with the expertise and ability to deal with crisis and trauma management. More importantly, ensure that provider can ramp up its resources if an incident requires volume support. Ensure the EAP can access employee contact information and reach out proactively.
Key Result: You establish creditability and demonstrate to employees that you are there for them.
Mistake #7: You don't listen and learn from past incidents
You survived the incident! Your post-incident review has addressed all of the issues that came up during the crisis, including the things that went wrong and the things people could have done better. You can just put together a SWAT team of high profile people who can blow through these actions and get them closed, right? Wrong!
Recommendation: Get back to basics. Let your people and customers tell you what they have learned. Create an open forum where your greatest assets - your employees - tell you what you could have done better and what failed.
End Result:You learn and change with collaboration from all your employees.
If your business continuity plan takes into account that your employees are your biggest assets, you'll find that old adage to be true: When the going gets tough, the tough get going!
About the Author
Andrew Fernandes, P.Mgr, CBCP, MBCI, is a certified business continuity practitioner with more than 10 years hands-on experience in business continuity and process improvements. He has written several whitepapers and is a regular speaker on the business continuity conference circuit. He is currently employed by Dell Inc, USA as Manager- Global Business Continuity & Recovery Program (BCRP). He can be reached at andrew_fernandes@dell.com.
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