It is now a fact of life that during your career there will probably be more than one incident – natural or man-made – that could have a disastrous effect on colleagues in your business.
How do you know who is potentially affected and how can you provide the help they need urgently? The simple answer is that you need to be prepared.
It is not hard to see why your business would be extremely lucky to avoid being hit by a crisis of some kind.
In 2017, data showed that the number of recorded terrorist incidents in the UK was 122, representing a six-fold increase over the previous 15 years. In the same year, it is reported that fire services were called to an average of 300 ‘non-dwelling’ building fires a week.
According to The winter floods of 2015/2016 in the UK, a review by the UK’s National Hydrological Monitoring Programme, extreme weather conditions are on the rise. It says that in 2015: “The magnitude, persistence and repetitive nature of the flooding had major adverse impacts on communities, infrastructure, agriculture and a host of other sectors of the economy.”
And all of this is before considering the increasing number of wildfires, major travel disruptions and occasional civil disturbances.
These days, it is not unusual for businesses to plan and prepare for the practical side of disaster management, such as backup IT systems and emergency office relocation.
However, the ability to locate employees in the event of an incident nearby and to protect them from harm can be a very difficult task to plan for. With your workforce forming the foundation of your business, and your duty of care towards the safety of your staff enshrined in employment law, there are economic, legal and moral cases for making such preparations a priority.
Arguably, the greatest challenge you face when a disaster occurs is locating all of your employees and determining how many have been affected. It is unlikely that you know where all your staff are at all times, and it could take hours or even days to account for everyone.
Even if you do manage to identify where staff are, how do you know whether they are in danger? Are you able to convey crucial guidance to relevant individuals to stay away from nearby danger areas or how to minimise risks to themselves? Passing critical information to a large number of workers poses a second challenge. Strong communication has the potential to prevent further damage and allow the business to resume its normal running as quickly as possible.
A traditional common approach has been to use ‘phone chains’ or simple messaging to try to communicate with all staff and ascertain their whereabouts. These methods are not only time-consuming and resource intensive, but can also be unreliable. Your employees may well be injured or just be preoccupied, so they might fail to respond to your messages or calls – how can you tell which?
However you are doing it, if you are trying to communicate with all staff then you are making the task even more difficult for yourself. Spreading an alert to people who are not directly impacted will only serve to increase the alarm and lead to confusing communication traffic as worried friends and colleagues try to contact each other.
Fortunately, developments in technology and the widespread use of mobile devices are providing solutions to incident management challenges. Whether by letting you know exactly where your employees are, telling you if they have missed a scheduled welfare check-in, or giving them the ability to raise a panic alert, technology is able to offer a solution.