Disaster Planning: How Ready Are You?

02/27/07

Sooner or later, it’s going to happen—that high-profile emergency that every manager dreads.

When you think of a disaster, you may think of a hurricane with its attendant power outages, accidents, and stranded employees. But disasters can also be unique to your company—an oil spill, or a major product recall. How ready will you be for these or any other disaster? The following tips will help you prepare.

Create and Test Procedures
Emergency procedures may include everything from implementing an employee evacuation plan to alerting law-enforcement agencies. Test your procedures often. This emphasizes their gravity, reinforces proper use, and reveals oversights or flaws in the system that should be corrected. Although details are beyond the scope of this article, you’ll need separate procedures for situations such as:

Industrial accidents.

Hazardous waste spills.

Acts of employee or customer violence.

Natural disasters such as floods.
Product recalls and related concerns, including customer injuries and lawsuits.

Allegations of illegal or unethical conduct that call for a public response.

Train Employees to Respond
Successful athletes confirm the value of mental preparedness. The same idea applies here. Training employees to think through and act out emergency procedures requires them to confront the unthinkable. Without thorough training, people often panic, freeze, and forget what they’re supposed to do—which can only make a bad situation worse.

Designate Key Contacts
Authorize certain employees to work closely with emergency-response crews and/or the news media. Have each of them choose a backup person in case they can’t be reached. Equip them with pagers or cell phones and dedicated emergency numbers.

Clarify the type of information these people may release without prior approval. Although it’s important to be forthright, your spokespeople should avoid public displays of emotion and speculation about an incident’s cause or effects.

Maintain a List of Contacts
A contact list should include the phone and fax numbers and e-mail addresses of law-enforcement agencies, fire-and-rescue authorities, hospital emergency rooms, the Red Cross, and your local emergency management office. Update the information monthly and distribute it to each member of your emergency-response team.

Consult Local Authorities
Ask emergency response and law enforcement officials to recommend generic disaster policies and procedures that you can adapt to your own operations. Their staff members may also evaluate your proposed disaster plan and compare it with those used by others.

In addition, some agencies may conduct seminars and training programs free or for a nominal charge. They can teach employers how to respond to specific types of emergencies ranging from toxic waste spills to natural disasters.

Learn from Disasters
You can’t prevent what has already happened, but you can always learn from it. Create procedures to record, summarize, and report the details of both accidents and close calls. Each incident can teach you something new about your operations or procedures and increase your arsenal of preventive techniques.

Interview everyone involved. In addition to preparing a written report, record their comments and observations on audio or videotape for future reference. Later, meet with them and discuss the incident. Ask the following questions:

1. Did we have policies and procedures to deal with this type of emergency?
2. Did you follow them? If not, why?
3. What circumstances, conditions, or equipment made the outcome either more or less serious than it might have been?
4. How could we improve our present emergency procedures based on your experience?
5. If we revise our present procedures, how should we notify employees of the changes and ensure that they’ll be followed?

Like insurance, you need to have your disaster plans in place before a crisis happens. If they are, you’ll sleep soundly at night instead of lying awake and wondering, “What would we do if…”