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Is Your Organization Prepared to Survive a Pandemic? |
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Thursday, 24 August 2006 |
By Darby C Doll
If and when the bird flu pandemic hits, it could spread across the United States within weeks giving your executive team little time to respond. In a matter of days, some of your executives and any number of your employees might be unable to come to work – quarantined, ill or caring for family members who are ill.
And yet, despite all the recent hype, few organizations have developed a work plan for business continuity in the face of the pandemic.
Is your organization prepared to survive an outbreak of the bird flu pandemic?
How would you answer these questions?
- Do you currently have a plan in place for business survival during a pandemic?
- Are your key executives ready to move into action if a pandemic starts spreading across the globe?
- If some or all of your senior executives were quarantined at home would they be able to communicate with each other and your customers and partners?
- Are you prepared for up to 50 percent of your employees to be unable to report to work?
- How would your organization be affected by possible border closures and travel restrictions?
At a recent seminar hosted by JohnstonWells Public Relations, “Pandemic Flu: How Can Healthy Communications Keep Your Business Alive?” panelists recommended that every company move today to develop a plan for an outbreak of the avian flu.
Here are some highlights:
Your standard crisis plan (if you have one) won’t cut it.
“A pandemic is so unlike any other disaster,” said Lori Neiberger, certified business continuity professional at LDN & Associates. “You really need a separate plan.”
And this plan should be tailored to your organization’s needs. Neiberger suggested hosting a workshop with key members from each department to:
- Identify crucial functions.
- Develop a list of your key employees and what role they serve.
- Determine how each department will handle a pandemic disaster.
Start with the basics, but start planning today.
A great first step is to conduct an internal audit of your organization’s preparedness.
“Start with all the what-if questions you can think of,” said Gwinavere Johnston, founder and CEO of JohnstonWells Public Relations. “For us, it’s: What if we can’t communicate with our clients? What if they can’t pay us? What if we can’t make payroll? The answers to these questions will help you recognize areas of weakness and will prove crucial in developing your pandemic survival plan.”
Your pandemic audit might include these initial questions:
- Does every one of our key executives have a computer and a high-speed Internet connection at home? Does each have access to critical files or our network?
- Do all of our executives have contact information for each of the other members of the executive team including home and cell phone numbers?
- If our computer network fails during a pandemic outbreak, have we backed up critical files and provided them to each member of our executive team?
- What are the critical functions our organization must maintain to survive a pandemic? Who is responsible for those functions? Have we cross trained other employees to support those functions if needed?
The Web site PandemicFlu.gov offers a great checklist for business planning with three options for each item on the checklist: not started, in progress or completed (see http://www.pandemicflu.gov/plan/businesschecklist.html).
Keep it simple.
According to Darrell Lingk, director of Disaster Preparedness, Safety and Environmental Management at Qwest Communications, Qwest developed its pandemic flu plan by assembling a committee from key departments such as disaster preparedness, corporate communications and human resources.
But even for a corporation as large as Qwest, the five-phase pandemic plan the committee developed was designed to be a simple as possible.
“Recognize that you can’t plan for everything and that for some things you’ll need to react in real time,” said Lingk.
Educate your employees.
One of the key aspects of pandemic planning is to make sure your employees are ready to respond.
“To get your employees on board, it makes sense to involve them in the planning process. And people need to understand the risk,” said Johnston. “Early on, we brought in representatives from the City of Denver’s Office of Emergency Management to speak to our staff about a potential pandemic and disaster preparedness. That helped everyone understand that we needed to take the issue seriously and plan for it.”
Once you have developed a plan, create an FAQ document on the pandemic for your employees explaining what a pandemic is and outlining your organization’s plans.
You can also develop targeted e-mail distribution lists tailored to your organization’s structure so that you can communicate directly with those you need to reach and keep them informed.
And it’s essential that more than one or two people are able to perform some of your organization’s crucial functions (such as payroll). Cross train other employees to perform these key functions so you can keep your organization on its feet for as long as a pandemic might last.
The most important point to come out of the seminar: start having the discussions and do the planning today. If you wait until the pandemic hits and starts to spread, it might already be too late. But if internal and external communications begin early, your business has the opportunity to function and to survive the unthinkable: a full-blown global pandemic.
Darby C Doll is a senior counselor at JohnstonWells Public Relations. While living and working in Taiwan, he – and the company he worked for – survived the SARS outbreak.
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