Emergency Notification
If you are responsible for Business Continuity or Emergency Notification, then you should have considered the best way to get in contact with your staff in an emergency.
There are many ways to communicate with your staff including:
- Text Message
- Push Notification
- Phone Call
- Social Media
Using an Emergency Notification System simplifies this process, speeds up your notification and provides accurate reporting data.
Consider a situation where your office is no longer available – it may be a fire, power outage or inaccessible for any number of reasons. You need to contact your staff and request that they work from home or an alternative location.
If the only option you have is to email your staff, the majority of them will still turn up to the office. Because most people don’t check their work emails while they’re getting ready to go to work. If the message is urgent it needs to be a text or a phone call.
Validating Communications
While choosing your method of communication is important; you also need to consider what you are going to say.
Validating communications is about having your Emergency Notification approved before it is sent out to ensure the message is:
- Clear
- Concise
- Timely
- Accurate
- Hint – if your message is a test – state this clearly at the beginning of the message.
To make this process easier you can develop pre-approved scripts. Once they are approved by Management then you have the authority to send out these messages in the appropriate context. This will speed up your response when it really matters.
Hawaii Case Study
In this example an Emergency Message was sent out that stated: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
- Clear – this message was not clear because they forgot to include the word “TEST” or in some way make it clear that this was not a real event. This error caused people to panic.
- Timely/ Accurate – the message was neither of these things, because there was no inbound missile.
If you want to increase your Organizational Resilience, start with preparing a Business Continuity Plan and check out BCP Builder’s Business Continuity Planning Templates.
