Communication is a critical component of planning for business continuity. Whether it's a crisis response team communicating among themselves or communicating to the public, communication is an area that should be considered in your business continuity plan. All too often, however, not enough time and attention is devoted to this area. In these articles, we are providing some information about this critical aspect of business continuity.
Along with your employees, your good reputation is your most important asset. What are you doing to protect it and maintain its value? If you're not doing enough, you could be in danger of losing or having a tarnished reputation from which you may never recover. Look at these articles for some things you could be doing right now to maintain or improve your reputation.
As meeting & event planners, you are constantly planning for everything, but we hope you don't forget to plan for unexpected disturbances and crises. Especially in this day and age, we all need to have plans and strategies for dealing with terrorists, active shooters, strikes, and other disruptions. These articles may help you develop those emergency and crisis plans.
October is fire prevention month, so we need to start thinking about what steps we need to take both to prevent and prepare to respond to fires. You probably do occasional fire drills but do you to any training for employees on how to prevent or escape from a fire? Is there some sort of annual review of the office to identify fire hazards? If not, some of these articles should be helpful to you.
Business continuity planning requires knowledge of all the risks you could encounter, especially -- at this time of year -- hurricanes. These articles can help you better prepare to be able to mitigate the risks and recover from weather-related and other disasters.
An active shooter in your workplace? It may never happen, but you just can't be sure. For this reason, you need to be sure that you and your employees know what to do in the event such an event occurs. The articles below can provide some help as will the DHS video in #6. May you never need to put any of these actions to use.
If you're not testing your Business Continuity Plan, hopefully you're working on it. Once you have your plan, you need to see if it will work as you think it will. Better to find out now that someone in a key role will freak out than wait until that individual does so in a crisis. Or, if there are a couple of steps missing, wouldn't it be better to find out now that in a critical situation? Silly question, right? Testing/exercising your plan will help you determine if your plan might be successful, but even any failures will teach you something.
Tabletop Exercises impart a significant amount of information regarding communication, response, and recovery skills needed for various scenarios. These simulations can take time to complete, and not everyone will be required or be able to join. Organizations must assess what staff members will benefit most from these exercises and what potential roles they play if a real event should occur. Here are a few factors to consider when deciding who should participate in your next Tabletop Exercise.
