How do you handle your business during a crisis?
I just finished an article for our most recent e-newsletter, The Point, offering suggestions on how businesses can prepare better for both natural and man-made disasters.
We in Kentucky have suffered a double whammy in the past 6 months. We’ve had both hurricane force winds that knocked out power to some for two weeks, then an ice storm from which we are still recovering.
We have helped a variety of our clients create and follow crisis plans and, without fail, they’ve told us how much better they felt being able to follow a plan, rather than simply running from one crisis to another.
How did we at New West weather the crisis? On the worst day of the ice storm, our office was open and we had power, but many of our employees could not get in. In anticipation of the bad weather, we asked employees to refresh themselves on the emergency office closing policy in the company handbook and download active projects on jump drives so they could work from home. Unfortunately, too many homes were without power so some projects were put on hold for a day or two.
Since our staff size is relatively small we created a “phone tree” to tell our staff of our plans the day the storm hit with a vengeance and we also sent out an e-mail as backup. Most of our employees have BlackberryTM service.
Frankly, we need to work on the no power, no phone, no cell, and no access scenario.
I am interested in determining how your company communicates with employees during an emergency, so we have set up a short survey you can take. We will share the results in a future e-newsletter article and/or blog post.
In the meantime, I’ll stress it again. We’ve already had a hurricane and an ice storm in the last few months… what other emergency is lurking out there? How will you deal with it?
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How do you handle your business during a crisis?
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