A business needs to be able to react immediately and confidently after a disaster, so it can quickly re-open and minimize loss. Below are plans the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recommends developing to ensure workplaces are ready when a flood, tornado, earthquake, fire, hurricane, or other disasters.
Emergency Response Plan – Planning for how your business will protect your employees, visitors, property, and the environment during and after a disaster includes processes for evacuation, lockdown, sheltering, and other site-specific responses. Safety is the top priority when developing this plan, and it should also include a post-disaster process for cleaning up, evaluating damage, salvaging property, and protecting undamaged property. These efforts will help reduce business disruption and damage.
Crisis Communication Plan – When a disaster happens, your business needs plans that will allow you to quickly and accurately communicate with customers, employees and their families, suppliers, regulators, government officials, the media, the community, and other stakeholders. Each of these audiences will want to know immediately if and how they will be impacted. A crisis communication plan will help your business get the right messages to the right people in a timely and positive fashion. Often this plan will include descriptions of key audiences and their anticipated concerns, assignments for who will communicate with each audience and how, and scripted message templates.
Business Continuity Plan – This plan is crucial to help minimize your business’ disruption, reduce financial loss, and retain your customers. When developing a continuity plan, conduct an impact analysis to pinpoint time-sensitive or essential business functions, and the resources and processes they require. Once the initial analysis is complete, write processes for recovering these functions and resources during an emergency. Create a business continuity group that will practice, test, and be trained to implement the plan.
IT Disaster Recovery Plan – Many business activities depend on the use of information technology. An IT disaster recovery plan includes processes to quickly restore hardware, applications, and data so the business can re-open quickly. It would also provide a plan for data backup to ensure critical files and information are kept safe.
Employee Assistance Plan – Disasters can impact employees and their families. They may experience costly expenses or be forced to stay somewhere other than their homes. Support employees as much as possible as they recover from an emergency. It’s helpful to develop a plan for how your business will aid affected employees, whether by providing financial assistance, connecting employees to the appropriate public agencies and services, or offering mental healthcare to help with the emotional impact of a disaster.
Knowing how your business will react before, during, and after a disaster will help minimize losses and get your business back up and running. If you have questions about how any of our products will help you, please give our Technical Support Reps a call at 800-922-8553, or email techsupport@northernsafety.com. They’re here to help!