BUSINESS CONTINUITY DURING PUBLIC HEALTH EVENTS

It is important that engagement efforts continue in these challenging times to support both employees and customers. Here are some tips that can help.

Make a Checklist of your own to prepare for Public Health Events, some of the action points I will consider

? Check the capability of IT Infrastructure to support workforce when working from home, remember this is to be done at organizational level (Country, Regions and Global).

? Set up plan of your actions and remember to prepare communication plan as well.

? Set up team meeting to review the action plan, roles and responsibilities.

? On-board your leadership team /stakeholders and review action plans with them.

? Ensure that approved plans are accessible to team members.

?Connect with your team members frequent to address their concerns and needs in an evolving situation.

? Create a Business Continuity Planning (minimum three level is recommended) What if solution 1 will not work?, Need a Solution 2. What if Solution 2 will not work need a solution 3.

The Virtual Environment:

As we all know due to Public Health Events schools are also closed and challenge everyone might face is “how to keep the kids busy and quite while you try to work?” Remember you are not alone in this even our colleagues and our customers are in the same situation. Ask for a quick 5 if you have to step aside when they are making noise or need your attention and tell your team that you stepping aside. Everyone will understand.

Take the opportunity to introduce your kids to your team members; they will love it (kids and your team members). I assume that all parents must get annoyed or feel embarrassed when interrupted by kids. But, I think we need to evolve and learn to accept the change and be open to give them the attention they need. Kids are smart today and they will soon realize that you are on call or attending a video conference and they will also adapt to this way of working.

Ensure our team members/employees stay fit: we all become little lazy when we work in virtual environment.   

Try and schedule virtual fitness sessions in different time zones if managing global teams where your employees can virtually join Zumba / yoga / stretching activities for 30min in a day and you can use open source tools to organize these sessions (i.e. Zoom, BlueJeans, WhatsApp, FB-video chat or Instagram -video chat)

Today everyone have a smart phone or wear’s a smart watch, set up minimum steps everyone need to take in a day and talk about it in your meetings, so we no longer check for weather report, rather we ask how many steps did we took. Feel free to set up weekly Steps challenge, and reward them with Amazon vouchers / gift cards.

That's your time

Encourage your employees to spend time with family, as this will at-least help release some stress.

Recommend not to watch News more than 30 min a day, as listening too much about anything makes you think even more.   

Community

Set up shared space where your employees can share some innovative ideas or good practices they are following during the Public Health Event shutdown.

Set up shared space to share the stories from different countries how other employees are preparing to fight which ongoing Public Health Event (epidemic). We can pass a strong message to our employees that we all are big family and we are connected.

Remember: you need to be calm and flexible to ensure your virtual working environment runs smoothly.

Up-skilling employees: Virtual Instructor led trainings, Self-Learning Initiatives and connecting with co-workers can be a rewarding experience during Public Health Event.