Debriefing

What is the best way to collect valuable information from front line staff that participated in an emergency response within your organization?

My recommendation is to hold a hot-debriefing session during the routine daily debriefs.

Feedback received from BCP Builder Community on LinkedIn:

Survey or Questionnaire

Developing an incident specific questionnaire on the fly is too slow to capture those hot issues.
It also might miss the opportunity to capture teams together before they dissipate.

Hot Debriefing

These hot sessions tend to focus on the tactical nuts and bolts of the emergency response and are essential to honing the response process.
Provide the debrief lead with a framework of general questions about the plans the teams have been following.
This will help to frame and facilitate the discussion.
It will also create room for the response participants to talk and discuss their experience of the response, to capture the things which you don’t know.
This is an opportunity to listen to each other and collect information in one report which will be sent to management.

Why record a Debriefing?

Capturing these thoughts can often be difficult and in certain professions this is handled by specialized teams.
Recording these sessions is good, as often they can be very dynamic.
The sessions should be recorded for the sole purpose of capturing rapid exchanges in conversations for the report. Rather than tagging any one individual.
The recording is useful for going back and listening to a point you may have missed.
Alternatively, if you can’t be at the meeting to type up the notes, you can prepare your report from the recording. It should not be used as a tool to record “he said, she said”.
In some cases, electronic recording of the session can suppress honest feedback.

Debriefing Questions

For an in-depth discussion on what questions you should ask in a Hot and Cold Debrief – have a look at this article: Debrief Questions

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.