Protect and Connect Your Most Valuable Assets

Up to now, a majority of the discussion around business continuity focused on the expense of downtime to organizations.

Numerous studies have indicated the cost per hour of downtime- ranging from simple network outages to major emergencies. Many organizations have become aware of the need to implement resilient capabilities within their communications and IT systems.

Unfortunately, many of these same organizations have failed to take into consideration the human costs, including emotional reaction, involved in emergencies. People are “social animals.” In today’s world, individuals’ work connections form an important part of this overarching social need. Meeting these basic needs by providing multiple channels of inbound and outbound communications will help protect your people and help provide for the emotional needs of employees in times of crisis. Placing your people and their needs first is not just the right thing to do- it’s a critical enabler of organizational continuity during an emergency.

This might be termed the human side of Business Continuity Planning, or workforce continuity. Given that the Society for Human Resource Management found during a recent study that barely one third of organizations indicated human resources were a significant component of their business continuity planning¹, this is clearly an under-planned area. Before you can actually perform as a business, or manage ongoing supply chain relationships, or even make critical decisions during the often-changing nature of events, your workforce must be protected and back on line. This is critical, not just in terms of protecting your people and keeping them informed, but also in terms of quantifiable losses that will occur when you fail to involve this component in your planning efforts.

To manage your business effectively during an event, you must be able to “protect and connect” the people whose work is what actually generates business profits. Failure to effectively plan for management of your human capital can be expensive. Consider that you may have your data centers and core technology infrastructure up and running, but your workforce may be unable to communicate or connect. Issues then arise, such as:

• Absenteeism or sheer inability to reach the office, causing lost worker productivity
• Critical decision-making hierarchies causing breaks in continuity that prevent rapid, flexible response to the changing nature of an event
• Key staff who may be out of touch, jeopardizing supply chain and customer relationships

Three Strategies to Protect and Connect

Business continuity planners should consider implementation of three strategies necessary for optimum workforce communications.

I. Have a Contact Strategy in Place

An effective communications strategy is a critical component to protect and manage your workforce during crisis. In rapidly changing situations, it becomes absolutely integral to ensure that all stakeholders are kept informed about important information in a timely fashion. When we look at this from the perspective of an organizations’ “community,” these key stakeholders go beyond just your employees to also include all of those in your supply chain, your customers and your physical community.

Effective communications programs can also assist organizations in overcoming the additional challenges of prolonged absenteeism, diminished or incapacitated public infrastructure across both the organization and supply chain, as well as the challenge of working with customers who themselves are likely to be out of touch. These plans can enable stakeholders to be in a better position to manage the communications, collaboration and efforts that will help maintain the organization. This will help create a community context, as they update stakeholders, employees and other key parties.

II. Use a Blend of Outbound and Inbound Communications

Imagine your employees during a major crisis. Their first concern is for their family and loved ones. They may have limited or no access to email or telephone services. Their state of mind is likely to be highly agitated. News may be intermittent, and they may feel isolated.

If you are looking to communicate successfully with these individuals during times of crisis, it must involve more than status updates, collaboration on projects, and other direct, work-related activities. It means connecting with their team members, their friends and family.

Providing people with this ability to connect helps ensure that individuals are better-informed and feel more in control- an absolute necessity for workforce continuity.

For example, to keep your employees connected with their families, you can use a load and send communications offering to include external stakeholders in your blended communications network during an emergency. This group can include individuals from employees’ families, as well as certain customers and supply chain partners. This functionality enables the organization to use contact data for individuals outside of the organization; enabling those individuals to access and have fully functional use of the system. Families can verify that your employees are accounted for and employees gain the peace of mind of knowing that their loved ones are receiving up-to-date information on access to gathering points, updates to public infrastructure challenges and other pertinent communications.

Your organization’s people, your suppliers, even your communities, will be concerned with the need to gather general situational information, speak with their friends, find out who’s doing well- to re-establish a social context. Until they have met these basic needs, they will be unlikely to perform business tasks and communications with any degree of success.

A recent Forrester report ² stresses that “workforce continuity” must be integrated into any successful Business Continuity plan. Workforce continuity is defined as:

A strategy that provides for connecting a disbursed workforce to the applications, data and communications they need in instances where pandemic, transit strike, natural disaster, or other event prevent the workforce from reaching a corporate facility.

Organizations must take this concept one step further, and provide the means to communicate effectively with their workforce, using a blend of both inbound and outbound communications. Doing so will provide greater connectivity with others in the organization, while enabling communication about the more macro-level events that may be happening in the world.

This blended communications methodology provides your workforce with a basic understanding of the nature, scope and details of the event, and enables communication within the organization, as well as external communications with customers, supply chain partners, and local emergency management personnel. Given the importance of workforce continuity, integrating outbound and inbound communications must be considered a cornerstone of successful business continuity planning.

Disasters such as Hurricane Katrina teach us that effective emergency communications cannot be a one-way street. In addition to being able to reach out to constituents rapidly and effectively, through a variety of channels, we must also provide a reliable method for receiving critical updates and other information from employees, customers, and other stakeholders on the ground during the thick of the crisis. This puts power in the hands of the employees, and allows them to take action. A simple inbound communications step, like having a dedicated call-in number to report their own status and well being from the field and let others know of urgent needs, can be of tremendous mental benefit to employees in an emergency. This same application can allow affected individuals to retrieve information about an urgent situation by phone, web, or web-enabled device.

III. Test and Train to Ensure Success

Once you have implemented an automated, blended communications solution as a component of your business continuity planning, you will then be able to respond rapidly- in real time- to events during evolving situations. But, like most technology solutions, the devil is in the details.

Simply implementing a solution as described above will not in itself deliver the protection, the psychological safety net that helps create a sense of control and understanding. Effectively prepared organizations have found they must:

• Publicize their plans to employees and other stakeholders
• Test and evaluate their plans on a regular basis
• Adapt and evolve plans as new information becomes available
• Evolve communications that protect people and assets, and keep affected constituents closely informed of changes

An effective, well-publicized, regularly tested emergency communications plan forms the backbone of organizational business continuity planning. Successful plans evolve to provide employees and other key stakeholders with a sense of control and context, along with accurate, cleanly and consistently delivered information.

For example, you must establish a philosophy behind the communications in order to get the most effective response you need to gather to make a difference to your people. You also must familiarize your stakeholders with the anticipated process and flavor of the communications to avoid hang-ups or non-responses from recipients during a real crisis.

When you test, it’s important to simulate real conditions. It’s critical to find a balance between having people accustomed to the system and having them ignore it because it’s routine. By giving participants input into the actual deployment, it invests them and makes them more committed to the plan’s overall success and prepares them more effectively in the event of an actual emergency.

What you say and how you deliver your message is critical in an emergency. The best practices identified below have been developed from years of actual results triggered by emergencies and take into consideration the emotional stress load of individuals during these episodes. Best practice recommendations include:

• Provide regular update and status information.
• Avoid over-communicating- it dilutes important information (the 11PM News effect).
• Use multiple communications channels to enable message prioritization.
• Send time-critical messages by phone.
• Send follow up messages or non-critical status messages via e-mail or bulletins.
• Reference other available device channels in all communications to ensure employees have these in mind during a very stressful time.
• Pay specific attention to tone of voice and pace. During an emergency, the simple sound of a known voice speaking calmly and deliberately can ease uncertainty and stress.

By focusing on your people and the full spectrum of their needs, you not only help them- you enable and empower them to respond to situations as flexibly as possible. Informed, connected employees whose human needs and concerns are being met form the indispensable foundation of organizational resilience. Ultimately, developing an effective communications plan that supports the human side of business continuity will help protect people, address their psychological needs and provide a mechanism to be better-informed and more in control.

¹ SHRM Study, 2005, Disaster Preparedness Survey Report
² Forrester Research, Dec. 2006, Workforce Continuity – a Critical Strategy in your Business Continuity Plan