Hunting the Black Swans in Your Continuity Program: Quarry #1 ― Employee Availability

This is the first in an ongoing series regarding hunting and mastery of the black swans in your continuity program. Read the Continuity egUidE (1st Wednesday of each month) for more black swans.

Those of us who manage complex Business Continuity and Emergency Management Programs sometimes have our blinders on, preventing us from seeing the “black swans” that could be most deadly when we need our interruption response capability most. These may not always fit the complete definition of Taleb’s1 black swans, in that they may not normally be considered outliers. But these situations certainly do meet the criteria of remaining outside the range of our normal expectations, and may produce a significant negative impact. For reasons of budget, culture, or simple lack of awareness, we are effectively prevented from seeing and dealing with these potentially devastating exposures in our enterprise continuity capability. And so while they may not be true outliers, they might as well be, because we cannot see them. This series of articles will deal with some of the most common of these “black swans” in business continuity programs, those that are really staring us in the face and screaming for attention.

Quarry 1: Employee Availability for Response Activities

Our quarry for this installment is Employee Availability for interruption response activities. Most organizations with Business Continuity Programs make the assumption that critical employees will be available to assist in response activities associated with a major business disruption. But really, why do these organizations believe that these resources will be available?

We begin with the almost universally unexamined assumption: our employees with critical skill sets will respond to calls for assistance after the event and will participate in the recovery. We will deal with two of the most important aspects of this assumption in this first article: 1) availability of employees and 2) employee willingness/capability to perform such emergency response work. We will then talk about specific programs that can provide the assistance that will enable these important contributors to the success of the response effort be more available when needed for critical response activities. Both of these together will provide specific weapons against this Black Swan.

Employee Physical Availability

The employees that we need are available:

• They are able to reach the recovery site from their current location (local and otherwise).
• They have not been seriously injured or killed in the same event.
• They feel that it is safe to leave their homes. In a large regional event, looting may threaten unoccupied partially damaged structures, causing them to want to stay in their property.
• They feel that it is safe to leave their families. In a large regional event, they may want to stay in shelters with their families or they may have evacuated beyond the immediate area and cannot return until transportation paths re-open.

In a large regional event, all of the above conditions may come into play, preventing designated recovery staff from being able to perform these duties.

Employee Willingness/Capability to Contribute to the Organization’s Response

The employees that we need wish to assist in the recovery of the organization:

• Their more immediate needs for food, water, shelter, medication, etc. are being met by the organization or other authorities.
• The organization is working with authorities to assure that all efforts are being made to locate missing family members of the employees needed for the recovery.
• The organization is providing employees working on the recovery with the assistance necessary to procure federal or other assistance so that key employees have the available time to work on the recovery.
• The organization will assure that assistance is provided to deal with insurance adjusters or others so that employees may be free to work on the recovery.

The organization’s HR or other employee support department will have deployed a number of special programs to assist employees and their families who may be physically or psychologically affected by the event. These programs should have as a priority the support of employees who have critical response roles and their families.

In the earliest days of disaster recovery, we were looking primarily at power outages and so-called “smoke and rubble” fire or explosive events. Now that we understand that many scenarios are regional, and may affect employees’ lives and those of their families as well as their property.

And so we as Managers of BC Programs need to consider these and all of the other interruption-specific support activities that we will need to provide if we want to ensure both employee availability and employee capability to work on response activities. It is not enough just to assume availability; an ongoing organizational capability, involving specific actions and programs, to meet the emergency needs of employees and their families must be in place. That is, unless you want your response capability to depend on a roll of the dice…..

Here Are Some of the Specifics That We Should Consider to Counter Potential Staff Unavailability

Multiple people for each critical response task

• Have significant “bench depth” in your critical response staff. At least 3 employees should be named for each critical response activity.
• The BC Program Manager should develop a detailed map that includes the pinpointing of residential addresses for all employees critical for the response effort. If those for a single activity are co-located within the same neighborhood or affected by the same roadway or other transportation failure, additional staff living in other areas should be trained.
• Track vacations of people assigned to the same critical response activity and whenever possible, do not schedule concurrent vacation time out of the area.

Sponsorship of emergency family preparedness

• Provide required training in emergency family preparedness for all employees.
• Provide continuous awareness activities regarding local community resources.
• Provide continuous awareness activities regarding the organization’s employee response support programs.
• Create an awareness of the organization’s responsibilities and the employee’s responsibilities.
• Consider providing home advisory visits on request for essential response staff members to train on individual family preparedness.
• Consider providing at least partial subsidy for emergency equipment and supplies.

Detailed response training for all critical response staff

• BC exercises will involve all of the multiple people responsible for execution of critical response activities, not just the “A” team.
• All those team members responsible for key response activities will participate in exercise debriefings involving their teams, even if they did not participate in the specific exercise.
• A key early deliverable for the BC Program should be the ongoing training of all critical response staff in their specific responsibilities.

Employee support teams

• HR or another area within the organization should develop, fully implement and exercise specific support programs designed to assist employees in management of the challenges to themselves and their families during a regional emergency.
• Employees charged with key response activities should be known to these support teams and should receive priority so that the emergency response essential for continuation of the organization’s essential activities can be implemented.
• Ensure that the organization has built its connections with local, state, and federal relief groups so that the organization can assure that support for key response employees and their families will be provided in a timely manner.
• These specific support programs should be regularly rehearsed in scenario-based table-top exercises involving external authorities and support groups.

There are many refinements you can make to ensure that your critical response staff members are available when you need them most. What you see above is just your opening salvo.

You will begin to “see” what these additional items are when you start to look at an emergency from the employee’s point of view. And when you cease to take employee availability as a given, then you will begin to weaken this particularly important Black Swan.

About the Author
Kathleen Lucey, FBCI, is President of Montague Risk Management, a business continuity consulting firm founded in 1996. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the BCI, and the founding President of the BCI USA Chapter. IBM chose her as the first winner of its Business Continuity Practitioner of the Year Award In1998. She speaks and publishes widely in both North America and Europe. Kathleen may be reached via email [email protected].

1 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, April 2007, Random House.