Make Your Disaster Plan Pay

By Guy Robertson

Your corporate disaster plan is more useful than you think. It includes many potential benefits aside from protecting you and your coworkers in the event of a fire, flood, or earthquake. Don’t ignore these benefits: enhanced safety and security, identification of future leaders, improving your brand with your clients, and even improved morale. They can justify your disaster plan even if you never need to activate it.

Enhanced Safety

Managers agree that teamwork can increase productivity. When you and your coworkers participate in the tabletop exercises used to test the effectiveness of your plan, everyone is encouraged to work together to achieve important results such as enhanced workplace safety and ongoing business operations. Tabletops allow participants to consider operations from a different perspective, and to share fresh ideas about keeping your organization productive.

Future Leaders

Ever wonder about who might be a good fit for a future supervisory position or management job? Consider the performances of various employees during a tabletop that investigates the best ways to resume business after a strong earthquake. Who comes up with the most practical strategies, and refuses to shy away from the more challenging questions? In the end, who shows a mixture of intelligence and guts?

That young woman in HR could be a future CEO. That fellow who just started in the mail room might make a top-notch facilities manager. You might not have spotted their talent if they hadn’t displayed it during the tabletop.

Promote DR Actions??

Key clients depend on you, and need to know that your organization could deliver goods and services after a wildfire destroys substantial property and puts many organizations out of business, perhaps permanently. Promote your Disaster Recovery program.

Why should your clients deal with your competitors when your organization is more likely to survive the worst and keep delivering services? And why not let other stakeholders—financial supporters, politicians, and shareholders realize that you are better prepared for disasters than other organizations? In fact, your disaster plan could be one of your more powerful marketing tools.

Morale

These benefits can lead to better corporate morale. You and your coworkers can be proud of your disaster plan and advanced level of preparedness in a risky world. Your organization could develop a reputation as the proverbial Good Corporate Citizen—a feature attractive to shareholders as well as employees.

Security

Disaster plans can inspire better security for data as well as people. The more effective plans create ways to harden the target and to protect your organization from malefactors including data thieves, frauds, and burglars. Your insurers will celebrate the possibility of smaller losses.

But above all, along with everybody else involved in your operations, they will agree that the ultimate benefit from your disaster plan is the likelihood of your surviving the next devastating event.

If you’d like to explore these ideas further or comment on this article, contact me at [email protected].

This article is reproduced from the February 2023 edition of The TMC Advisor.?advdoc.php (tmcconsulting.ca)