A civil approach to an uncivil problem

Before the government declared a state of emergency, I’d already declared my own. 

I‘m a volunteer for a Civil Defence Response team, a role in which we’re trained in aspects of emergency management.

I’m also a small business owner, so, like many other businesses, I found myself in a pretty desperate situation about four weeks ago: A stream of calls cancelling or postponing work, costs that weren’t going anywhere, a team of people who rely on their salary to put food on their plates, and uncertainty about how it was to play out. 

How would my business survive? How could I keep my employees? Was there a future? Questions like this ran through my mind at lightning speed. I realised my business was  a victim and it got me thinking about how I may use approaches developed for managing emergency situations, to guide my actions in my day job.

Objectives

My first port of call was to look at the overall objectives of disaster management:

1. Reduce, or avoid, losses from hazards
2. Assure prompt assistance to victims
3. Achieve rapid and effective recovery.

Rescue priority

So where to start? Well there’s a hierarchy of rescue that dictates where priorities lie in terms of reducing risks to people. I think they can be adapted to the business setting.

1. Self - this doesn’t mean be selfish - just that if you are compromised, you can’t help anyone else. In my situation that means ensuring that any decisions about the business do not put it, and therefore me, into danger financially or emotionally. To be of any assistance you actually have to be in the right frame of mind and able to respond.
2. Team - People, people, people. The most important asset. From day one, my focus was on looking after the staff and reducing the impact as much as possible. We rely on each other. Without a team or with a damaged team, the business cannot be “rescued”.
3. Public - In rescue, they’re the innocent bystanders. I considered my customers as ‘public’ in this event of course, as it transpired, many of them were victims too.
4. Victim - In a rescue environment, this is the person who is in peril. Our first instinct is to put them at the top of our hierarchy, but we must reduce the risks to the others first to ensure we’re in the best position to respond effectively. In our example. the business is the victim, and in reality, until self, team and customers are looked after, we can’t help the victim.

The four Rs

In our rescue training, we talk about the cycle of emergency management. As you can imagine, in the rescue business, there’s an acronym for pretty much everything. In this case, we have The four Rs - Response, Recovery, Reduction, Readiness. This is the framework I worked through for my business.

Response

In the current COVID situation, this is where we all find ourselves at the moment. Response for some started and finished with the whole “hey, we’re washing our hands” emails, but for others, it’s an ongoing and at times a difficult process. 

As the initial dust settles, response is a case of looking at the situation and its dangers: Identifying the victim(s),  working through our priority of rescue and then planning the actual rescue. 

Looking at ‘self first, means setting some parameters. For me it was how much could I afford the business to suffer, before I needed to think seriously about whether rescue would actually be in my best interests.

Next job was looking at my team - how we could weather the storm with everyone on board?  We collectively agreed to a little suffering, rather than the unthinkable redundancies. Hence, we moved to a four day week.

With the internal staff accounted for, I started to consider the next group ‘the public’. We contacted our customers. We chose not to do it via an email blast. People want personal communication in times of crisis. So we just picked up the phone or sent an informal email. It was a case of checking that our customers were ok, even if spending was on hold. Fortunately, we could also identify aspects in which we could help them through times like this - so we offered a hand if anyone needed it.

Finally we turned our attention to the victim, we started planning for the business using our relationships with our accountant, bank, landlord, economic development agency and so on. This also meant looking at ourselves in a way that we never really had time for, our processes and user journeys - the way we do business. It’s a rare opportunity to do some of the things we can never get around to.

Recovery

Recovery is all about healing wounds, rebuilding and returning to a sense of normality.

As of Monday, some of the unknown has been lifted, we know that restrictions will be eased and that life will slowly begin to approach normality. This is where we transition from response to recovery. For us, it involves looking at what our customers will need in the last days of lockdown, in the weeks following as the country heads into “after COVID-19”, and beyond - when things may be permanently different. 

We’ve used our own learnings through this time, as well as those from previous smaller-scale emergencies to extrapolate our recovery plan. It includes a review of our service offerings in which we have integrated packages in new offerings to assist organisations with their own recovery. We’ve also tailored activity for our existing customers in ways that we believe will have the best impact for them.

Nothing here is new. It’s been said that there are opportunities that come out of the most challenging situations - find them and grab hold.

Reduction

We may be at the tail end of the current crisis. The reduction part of the cycle looks to Identify future risks and take steps to eliminate them, if practicable. If not, reduce the magnitude of their impact and the likelihood of them occurring. We have all learned from Covid-19 and maybe some of those learnings will help us weather a similar storm that could be days/months/years away. Ideally, this is done before an event...but this is a cyclical process after all.

I can’t eliminate the risks to business from pandemic. Therefore the focus is in reducing those risks. For me this will mean building financial resilience.

Readiness

Six months ago, imagine how you may have reacted differently if you knew that the planet was about to shut down. Readiness is all about preparing and having a response plan in place. My business has customers from different industries, sizes, public and private sectors and so on, to spread risk. Pandemic definitely rides roughshod over that risk mitigation. 

However, readiness for the future will build up a resilience pot to ease cashflow, regularly testing and updating the capabilities of our IT infrastructure, finalising our crisis communication plan (one of those tools we’ve developed in our COVID lockdown), improving the response plans we’ve conceived and crucially, developing the new relationships that I have made with people from all sorts of areas during the response. All of these things need to be in place if this sort of event happens again. 

And if this type of emergency arises again, every step of the four Rs will be refined - that’s the great thing about a cyclic process.

The real question: Did it work?

I don’t know. 

I have used learnings in my “other life” to shape my response to a real emergency in my business life. I definitely feel it’s helped so far. We're moving from response to recovery and my plans say we’ll make it through. It may not be perfect, but I think we have managed hit those three objectives of disaster management.

But, as with any rescue, you never know until recovery is complete and you’re sitting down with a hot cup of Yorkshire Tea.