Preparedness Month: Let’s Prepare for Business Uncertainties

Impromptu, frequent, and catastrophic, can be the words that would be apt to define ever-evolving disasters. New viruses are emerging, wildfires getting wilder, and floods and heavy rain are becoming an everyday concern. It has become almost every day that we face some kind of disruption of low to high degrees of repercussions in our lives and businesses. To be more precise, scroll down.

Although, we with our people and possessions should remain vigilant and prepared. But because it’s preparedness month, our newsletter would be doing an injustice to its subscribers if hadn’t addressed the importance of preparing for disasters and emergencies that could happen at any time. After all, the motive here is to keep businesses vigilant and aware of disruptions around the world that may directly or indirectly impact your business operations.

Disasters can lead to extensive damage such as downed trees, power outages, network outages, and structural damage including homes, warehouses, or other facilities. Additionally, disasters can evolve into bigger disasters such as heavy rainfall that can result in floods.?

The Annual Number of Natural Disaster Events Globally from 2007 to 2021

Source: Statista

Disasters can result in financial burdens, environmental damage, loss of life, and psychological distress for the people belonging to the organization or community impact. Natural catastrophes pose a significant impact on the businesses and economy in more ways than one.?

1. Supply Chain Disruptions: Moving goods and services in affected areas becomes impossible as roads become impassable, airports remain closed, and bridges collapse. The cost of supply chain disruption can vary from loss of revenue, loss of productivity, and damaged reputation when products do not reach customers' schedules.?
2. Communication Barriers: The loss of communication infrastructure holds a significant effect on businesses, contrary to instances of mass hysteria which are temporary and only last for a day or two. This problem usually occurs when a natural disaster demolishes power stations, cell towers, and optical fiber lines, and this can sustain for weeks in the worst cases.?
3. Damaged Buildings: Natural disasters pose substantial damage to commercial buildings resulting in repair costs and loss of revenue. In 2017, Wildfires demolished 8,700 buildings in Northern California. A lot of these buildings were used for business.
4. Loss of Equipment: Disruptions can damage chairs, office cabinets, tools, and equipment as well. The cost of replacing and repairing these damaged items again be disabling for many organizations. Especially, if they don’t have access to insurance, government loans, or grants.
5. Loss of Personnel: Unfortunately, people lose their lives when a disaster occurs. The flooding that Hurricane Katrina caused in New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast resulted in 1,833 fatalities. Many among them were employees at organizations and intuitions. Consequently, organizations lost their valuable employees due to the hurricane.
6. Loss of Clientele: Natural disasters cause loss of clientele as people migrate from the affected area. For example, during a calamity, entertainment spots will witness a significant drop in the number of patrons. Damaged goods and lost stocks are also other repercussions of natural calamities for many organizations.?

Preparedness Tips for Individuals?

Preparedness Tips for Organizations

The goal of an emergency preparedness plan is to save lives, preserve the environment and protect property and the economy (Public Safety Canada)

Focus on Prevention/Mitigation: Understanding where your operational blind spots are and having action plans to prevent a realized threat from significantly impacting your organization is vital for continuity. While we cannot predict all future accidents or disruptions, we can begin addressing how we approach identifying our blind spots and creating plans fit for the purpose with the following approaches:

• Risk-Based: Approach ways to prevent known or emerging risks from impacting your organization.
• All-Hazards: Understand all hazards that are present within your organization, and begin identifying methods of prevention or improving on methods of prevention.
• Scenario/Tabletop Exercises: Create scenarios and invite key stakeholders to speak through a future state disruption that occurred to begin ideating further methods of prevention.

Establish an Evacuation Plan: With people’s safety being the top priority for every single organization - Preparing for an evacuation of an office or home office for certain disruptions is integral to developing the knowledge of “What do I do?” when the disruption occurs. The most common evacuation plan is the fire drill. During fire drill exercises - It is important to consider the speed of the evacuation during exercises to measure the effectiveness of the plan, consult with local emergency services on how to improve your evacuation plan, and finally, consider the use of emergency notifications during exercises and provide alternative instructions for gathering spots. If you have staff working from home, have them participate in fire drills and encourage their families to participate as well to improve their ability to vacate a structure during a disruption.

Keep an Updated List of Emergency Contact Numbers: Maintaining records of employees or critical supplier contact information can reduce communication challenges during a disruption. Having a Crisis Management Plan to preemptively develop, implement, and exercise ways the organization will communicate with employees, suppliers, clients/customers, recovery vendors, or other key stakeholders during a disruption will aid in the development of muscle memory when a threat is realized. Ensure confidentially of contact information through the use of a Human Resource Management System (HRMS) that can integrate with automated notification programs to reduce risks related to breaches, contacting previous employees, and the time it takes to recover.

Adapt an Operational Resilience Mindset: Building operational resilience is more than just a framework of set processes to assess impacts on an organization and create mechanisms to respond. Integrating Business Continuity, IT Disaster Recovery, Risk Management, Crisis Management, Project Management, Agile, and Data Analytics to help drive transformational change for an organization to minimize vulnerability, resist negative impacts, respond if an impact is realized, and recover once the threat has been realized.

Sign up for Alerts and Warnings: Depending on the need for information, communication streams from public channels can help aid you in providing information during a realized threat. Some examples of alert structures and warnings include:

• Specialized software that provides early detection warnings of upcoming potential disruptions related to weather.
• Twitter feeds that follow certain hashtags and/or organizations. TwitterDeck also helps significantly in creating visuals of multiple inputs of information using Twitter lists of related tweets.
• RSS and email subscriptions from local news agencies and/or if applicable, distribution lists of local emergency distribution lists. Some news agencies also provide the option for push notifications for mobile devices, which typically provides you with a method of being notified of additional information that may be important for how the organization is responding to a threat.
• Word of Mouth Alerting Plan can be a process where employees and/or key stakeholders understand a plan of action to notify you or critical individuals as soon as a threat has been realized, provide updates in real-time to help gauge estimated impact, and help in conducting recovery processes earlier.

Create an Emergency Kit: Depending on the work environment, size of the organization, and hazards potentially present – An Emergency Kit should be easily accessible and have, frequently inspected, and if possible, all employees trained on how to use an emergency kit including how to respond as groups when attending an accident.

Protect Vital Business Records: As this category is related to physical non-digital files, understanding what documents are required by either law or regulation that need to be in physical print and stored for a set period of time will help reduce the impact of loss. Loss can range from fires, breaches due to stolen information, or losses related to digitizing/scanning information for digital records. Assessing and mapping out these dependencies to teams within your organization can also provide you with alternative solutions in securing files rather it be in an off-site fireproof cabinet, a 3rd party file storage facility, or addressing a change in how the organization uses physical files by introducing the requirement of digitization records.

Backup Files to the Cloud: While saving data and files on cloud servers has become the norm, organizations need to consider threats related to core-cloud dependencies such as hardware servers located in a specific geographic location and internet service provider connections and reliability. Other challenges to considering cloud backup are Global Data Protection Regulations (GDRP) for applicable countries, the security the cloud provider provides (e.g., AES/SSL), firewalls, and locked server cages. Other means of safe storage could also include Internal Hard Drives, Removable Storage (e.g., External Hard Drives, Solid-State Drives, etc.).

Ascent with its efforts commits to preparing people and businesses for disasters, both natural and manmade, especially the extreme weather events that have increased in frequency and ferocity. To ensure that businesses have the resources and guidance they need to keep their processes, operations, and employees safe, we are conducting a webinar on Thursday, September 29th at 8:00 am ET. The event will be hosted by BCM experts – Kundan Shekhawat (CEO), Abdul Sajid Shaikh (Product Head at Ascent), Martin Gierczak (VP), and Pushkar Jha (VP). To register for the webinar, click here.