"It´s been my experience, both personally and professionally, that the hardest part of taking responsibility is deciding to do it. Of all the powerful natural forces I´ve confronted in my work-tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods-I put inertia right up there with them."
-James L. Witt, Stronger in the Broken Places
In my eight years as the Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) I witnessed some of the worst disasters our nation has ever faced. As I traveled across the country from disaster to disaster I saw reoccurring patterns.
From a city hall in Missouri whose walls bore a multitude of high water marks testifying to thirty years of flooding to a household in Alabama with all the furniture up on bricks-the more we saw, the more we realized that steps could be taken to protect people and prevent the damage from disasters. It was no longer enough to help people recover; we needed to teach them how to plan for a disaster.
The reality is that by planning and preparing for the worst that could happen you find the best in yourself and your people. This is true whether you are a small town in the hurricane belt, or a Fortune 500 company.
Assess Assets and Risks In the past decade, businesses, universities, hospitals and other organizations have invested in IT storage and recovery. Unfortunately most have not extended that planning and forethought beyond IT. Even companies that have protected their facilities have often underemphasized their most crucial asset-their employees.
For example, the General Electric plant in Wilmington, North Carolina spent millions renovating and retrofitting their facility against a hurricane; and when Hurricane Fran struck the plant went unscathed. After picking up the fallen tree limbs in the parking lot, the gates were opened to start the workday.
Unfortunately, no one was there to work. All of the employees were at home with their families struggling to recover from the hurricane. If GE had extended its business continuity planning to its employees then they would have reduced the disruption to production and saved their employees a lot of heartache. As it was, they went out a bought as many generators as they could find, delivered them to their employees and sped up the recovery process enabling them to return to work faster.
Planning and Preparing Human Resources and operations managers are often assigned the task of risk management and emergency response planning. While, risk management can be a new and overwhelming responsibility for some people, it is also an opportunity to improve internal relations in a company and extend your partnership building out into your community.
A good way to begin promoting preparedness is to encourage your employees to go home and sit down with their families to plan for a disaster. The American Red Cross has a family preparedness checklist and FEMA has a great interactive website for kids, check out the resources available at: www.redcross.org and www.fema.gov
Planning is crucial because disasters rarely happen at convenient times. What are you going to do if there is a crisis when parents are at work and kids are at school? What happens is many of your employees get in their cars and drive off to find their children? Does your plan account for this? How will you account for them? Is this likely to happen? Is this the safest and smartest thing for them to do? Good emergency response plans help keep people safe by considering all contingencies and likely human behaviors.
On September 11, 2002, when the plane crashed into the Pentagon, people poured out of office buildings flooding the streets of DC. The entire town became one huge traffic jam; no one could get across town let alone across the bridges that link the District and Virginia. Most of the people on the road had no idea what the extent of the danger was or if where they were going was safe.
Employee protection is a key element of Business Continuity Planning. But proper planning also helps protect the bottom line and the entire community´s economy. If your business is devastated by a disaster and cannot recover, a rise in unemployment, or a decrease in the tax support of local schools will affect your local community.
Most organizations have a rudimentary plan, but many have not updated their plans to reach beyond a fire evacuation plan. Preparing for a crisis is worth the investment-on average, a company experiences a crisis every four years. Studies indicate that for every dollar spent on prevention saves anywhere from six to eight dollars in future economic losses.
Companies need to evaluate what they would spend to promote their business and then consider spending at least half of that to protect their business. If a company spends $300,000 on marketing annually, then they should be willing to spend at least $150,000 to ensure that the company is protected.
Exercise and Drill the Plan While your company or organization evaluates its response plan there are little things you can do now. Have emergency supplies onsite, such as flashlights for all of your employees. Make sure that the company does complete fire drills and evacuations. When you practice the plan make sure that the appropriate decision makers and spokespeople can be located. Do the most thorough exercise you can of the plan you have and then work from there.
Once you develop or revise a plan, make sure that you communicate that plan to your employees, clients and local community. Information will allay fears by giving employees control over response, and your actions demonstrate that you care about them and that you are working to protect them.
Develop partnerships with other leaders in the community. Make sure that you introduce yourself to the local fire chief, police chief and emergency managers. If there is a crisis, you are going to want to make sure that they know who you are. Share your emergency response plans with them so that they can be an ally during a crisis.
Assessing, planning, and exercising sound like simple steps-and they are, but most people put off planning until it is too late. By taking the initiative and planning today you will save lives and mitigate damage to your facilities; but most important, your actions let your employees know how important they are to you and the company.
James L. Witt''s book, Stronger in the Broken Places, is available at amazon.com.
