Emergencies can crop up without any warning, but a business needs to prepare for its eventuality. A well-thought-out emergency plan and recovery plan can prevent unexpected disruptions to business operations.
Natural disasters, such as floods, fire and earthquakes, can strike without warning and throw a spanner into your business.
Your primary aim with an emergency plan is to ensure that your business can act and continue operations. To do so, you need to have in place specific plans for your business to manage operations in an emergency. Plans need to cover before, during and after an emergency.
More than Just an Emergency Plan.
You will want to ensure that you have the following plans developed for your business:
- The continuity plan helps you prepare your business for an emergency by identifying risks to critical areas and how best to protect them.
- The emergency action plan allows you and your staff to know what to do during an emergency.
- The recovery plan guides your business’s recovery after an emergency.
Once you have those in place, you will need to ensure that you have supporting documentation. Documentation should include detailed emergency procedures, evacuation maps and insurance information. Having these documents in place lets you ensure that your emergency management plans are a smooth process.
To keep that information up to date and ensure that your emergency management plan stays relevant to changing situations and circumstances, you will need to review the contents regularly. Keeping both the management and recovery plans updated will ensure preparation is in place for any eventuality.
If staff changes occur or locations for business alter, an updated plan needs to reflect this.
All of your staff should know of the plans and procedures that are in place. Doing so through practice, drills, and repeated enforcement of the steps to be taken can help you determine if anything needs to change. This is a key opportunity to understand the efficiency of your emergency procedures and plans for your business and improve if anything can be done.
This could be as simple as fire and evacuation drills, through meetings and safety courses for what to do in an emergency.
