For major corporations with workers spread across the United States, big cities are the nodes on a network of opportunity and, occasionally, danger. So, the price for a company´s access to business opportunity is the need to plan for disasters of many kinds.

San Francisco has world-class creative workers - and killer earthquakes. Chicago is a mammoth transportation hub - with O´Hare, a teeming crossroads for viruses hitching rides on people. Miami has prime access to Latin American markets - and hurricanes that travel over tropical waters. And New York houses financial giants - potential terrorist targets.

For all the preparations made by the IT staff, the facilities department, lines of business and the business continuity planners, success or failure often comes down to this: what workers are capable of, for better and worse, under extraordinary circumstances. That´s where HR comes in.

"There were plans in place for Katrina, but the human factor wasn´t taken into account," says James Kennedy, business continuity service practice lead for Lucent Technologies Inc. in Whippany, N.J. "I don´t believe that planners considered that people on recovery and response teams would be so impacted that they couldn´t perform their roles."

"Disaster preparedness is a unique opportunity for human resources to take a leadership role, to coordinate HR activities with IT and the facilities people," says Charles Grantham, a principle with consulting firm Work Design Collaborative LLC in Prescott, Ariz.

HR Coordinates Communications and Backstops Disaster Planning
In the chaos following a disaster, many displaced employees will naturally turn to human resources to get back in touch with the company, their bosses and coworkers. HR needs to understand which communications media are functioning and which are not, and somehow communicate this information to employees in distress.

"Human resources´ role in a disaster is to serve as the nerve center of the workforce," says Vern Jeffrey, a product specialist with ComPsych Corp., a Chicago consulting firm that provides employee assistance programs. "HR needs to make plans to track and account for employees."

But in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, human resources in many companies took on roles that went far beyond communications czar.

"Our director of HR services from the beginning was the central figure in orchestrating our emergency services," says Howard Shapiro, the partner in charge of Proskauer Rose LLP´s 23-employee New Orleans office, which was closed from the Friday before Katrina hit until the first week in December. Proskauer is a national law firm with about 700 attorneys.

Human resources can give shape to the company´s business continuity planning by getting the executive committee to agree to and enforce timetables for completion of plans, by implementing training, and by scheduling drills for offices across the country.

It may also be up to HR to ensure that contingency plans don´t become a dead letter. "You´re always going to have to update and rehearse the plan and make things more efficient," says Jeffrey.

HR Distributes Lessons Learned Across the Enterprise.
Human resources can also push forward an organization´s disaster planning and response by reaping lessons learned and disseminating best practices from one company operation to others.

A key last-minute preparation for Proskauer was to move all its content - documents, e-mail and so on - on the servers of its downtown New Orleans office to the firm´s national headquarters in New York City. The data transfer wasn´t completed until 5 a.m. on August 29, an hour and a half before the hurricane made landfall 100 miles to the south.

"We barely completed this - it takes more time than anyone thinks," says Shapiro. Proskauer´s efforts were effective; relocated lawyers filed a brief to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals just eight days after the hurricane.

Building in enough time for last-minute preparations - and deploying systems to avoid the need for special preparations in cities vulnerable to instant disasters like earthquakes or terrorist attacks - are lessons that HR can promote across the organization.

Human resources executives can also play an important role by demanding a reality check when the company considers expensive strategies such as the establishment of "hot" or failover sites. These alternative work locations, designed to get up and running quickly in an emergency, have a mixed record of performance. "We´ve seen more failures than successes of these in the last year," says Grantham of Work Design Collaborative.

"With Katrina, many organizations had failover sites that were thought to be far enough away, but were not," Lucent´s Kennedy adds.

Employers Must Take Care of People, as well as the Business.
If failover sites haven´t been set up or even fail, human resources may be called upon to help arrange new or temporary work sites. In some cases, as for many companies and employees caught up in Katrina, the company may need to get involved in employee relocation, with an eye to retaining valued workers in order to resume business operations as quickly as possible.

At Proskauer, 10 of 13 attorneys and seven of 10 staffers in New Orleans were temporarily relocated to the firm´s Boca Raton, Fla., after managers determined that Houston and Baton Rouge, La., would be overcrowded with evacuees. "The firm immediately got us hotel rooms, then started working on condos," says Shapiro.

But employers can´t afford to focus solely on making employees productive. The company may also need to provide immediate access to psychological counseling, through its employee assistance program, health care coverage or by special arrangement.

"Disaster will create a level of human suffering that is extremely traumatic, which was true for Katrina," says Kennedy.

John Rossheim is a journalist in Providence, Rhode Island who writes about workplace issues, employment trends and changing relationships between employers and workers.  Johnregularly contributes to Workforce Insights, an online resource about emerging labor trends and issues produced by Veritude.

About Veritude

The article originally appeared in Workforce Insightson Veritude.com. Veritude provides strategic human resources - the talent, technology and tactics that growing firms need in order to anticipate and adapt to changes in the workplace. Veritude is a wholly owned subsidiary of Fidelity Investments. Headquartered in Boston, the company serves clients throughout the United States and Canada and is part of Fidelity´s ongoing investment and leadership in outsourced HR services.To review other articles, research and expert analysis relevant to HR professionals seeking to stay informed, please visit www.veritude.com.  For more information, contact: inquiry@veritude.com or call:1-800-597-5537. 

^©2006 Veritude,LLC.  Reprinted with permission.