The Essential Guide to Emergency Preparedness Plans for Businesses

by Carolyn Kick | Mar 18, 2020 | COVID-19 Resources

In recent weeks, the global outbreak of COVID-19 has laid bare what many risk and safety experts have known for a long time: businesses are generally far less prepared for most emergency situations than they realize. That’s why we decided to take this moment to discuss what emergency preparedness looks like, what you need to do, and how you can be sure your protocols and policies work well.

Moving forward, we’ll walk through the Who’s, What’s, Where’s, When’s, and How’s of emergency preparedness to explore:

• Who needs to be involved in which aspects of your emergency preparation planning
• How to know what to plan for
• How to identify and address your organization’s unique challenges and strengths
• How to create relevant evacuation and post-emergency protocols
• How to foster an approach to emergency preparedness that’s strong and designed with growth and evolution in mind

Who?

Who Will Be Leaders & Points of Contact in an Emergency?

Your first logistical concern for an emergency preparedness plan is identifying which key team members will coordinate and own your emergency preparedness efforts. Safety and security directors are natural fits, as are top HR personnel who have a deep understanding of chain of command and organizational depth chart.

Once that team comes together, they in turn need to identify team- and department-based leaders who will aid them in spreading the word about emergency preparedness protocols and serve as organizational aids and points of contact during an emergency or drill.

Depending on the size and culture of your organization, it might make sense for those leaders to be departmental managers and supervisors, or it could be beneficial for your emergency team to represent professionals from various tiers and backgrounds within your team. It’s all about creating a leadership and command team that’s scaled to the way your team is organized.

What?

What Might Happen?

The easiest emergency to prepare for is the one you see coming and take seriously. That means your emergency preparedness team needs to use research and brainstorming to identify scenarios that might impact your business and create a plan of action for each one.

It may sound like grim work, but it’s important to think realistically about what bad things might happen. Of course, the specific threats are going to vary based on your region, industry, and other factors, but it’s important to think of things like:

• Fires
  • Fires inside the office or building
  • Nearby wildfires or fires in adjacent structures
• Natural disasters (earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes)
• Active shooters
  • Active shooters on-premises
  • Active shooters reported in the area
  • Addressing credible threats from/concerns about potential shooters
• Building or structural failures
• Hazardous material exposures
• Employee medical emergencies (heart attacks, strokes, seizures, etc.)

Once you’ve created a list of anticipatable emergencies, you can begin to create comprehensive, powerful plans to address each scenario while also building a leadership and organizational framework you can apply during other unforeseen emergencies.

What Are Our Strengths?

As you begin to create your emergency plans and protocols, you need to think about which strengths you can leverage to help you in an emergency. For example:

• Do you have any employees with a first responder, military, or medical background? How can their knowledge and expertise improve your planning or response?
• Is there anything strategic or inherently safe about the location and design of your office or campus? Which places are especially safe in each of the above scenarios?
• Do you have a great team where people treat each other like a family? How can you put that positive community spirit to work during an emergency?
• What resources have you compiled that could be useful in an emergency situation? How can you get access to employee rosters and contact information quickly?
• How do you communicate most effectively? What communication protocols are most effective within your existing culture, and how can you extend that to an emergency situation?

What Are Our Weaknesses or Exposures?

Of course, it’s equally important (if not more) to consider your weaknesses when it comes to emergency preparedness. You need to think about what unique challenges you face because of the way you do business, how your surroundings create exposures or weaknesses, and what you can do to address those concerns.

Your weaknesses or exposures will be specific to your business, but it’s important to think about things like:

• Where are there gaps in the security of your building?
• Do your surroundings make you uniquely susceptible to damage from earthquakes, mudslides, forest fires, tornadoes, etc.?
• Where are hazardous materials stored, and what negative things could potentially happen there?
• What factors (either controllable or not) might hinder first responders in their efforts to provide support to your team in the case of an emergency?
• What problems might you run into during an emergency?
  • Do we have a comprehensive way of knowing who’s supposed to be here?
  • Is our communication framework reliant on electricity, cell service, etc.?

What Do Employees Need to Know?

So, you’ve got a core team of emergency preparedness leaders and an identified network of team- or department-based sub-leaders who understand your emergency protocols, preparedness plans, communication strategy, and overall approach to crisis management. But before you can actually express confidence in your preparedness, you need to figure out what information rank-and-file employees need to know in order for your plans to be effective and how you will communicate that information to them.

Where?

Where Will Employees Go During an in-Office Emergency?

Be sure to think about:

• How different evacuation routes/destinations might be preferable for different emergencies
• Where members of different departments will go if they are at their desks during an emergency
• How employees will connect with others if they’re away from their usual work area during an emergency
• How you’ll know who is where during and after an emergency
• How various conference rooms and communal spaces will be evacuated
• How structural emergencies (fires, inaccessible stairwells) could impact any of these concerns

Where Will Employees Go During an Office Shutdown?

If your office is closed during or after an emergency, it’s important to keep a beat on where your workforce is dispersing to. That means having a strategy to enable remote work and figuring out how you’ll address pay, child care, etc.

When?

When Will We Practice?

No emergency plan – no matter how good it is – will ever succeed in a real use case if it isn’t backed by thoughtful preparation. That means emergency drills.

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is drilling everybody at once, however. The best strategy is to have your emergency preparedness team and team leaders practice their administrative duties several times before and then have those small group leaders practice with their individual teams as well. That way, when the large-scale coordinated drill happens, nobody is experiencing the protocols or walking through their role in the plan for the first time.

It’s also key to think about how you will blend planned and unplanned drills. In all honesty, nobody loves unplanned drills, but they’re highly beneficial for your own plan development and your local first responders, who need to see how you and your employees will address emergencies so they can react accordingly. Finding a balance between lower-pressure walkthroughs and full-speed, all-hands drills is key to building a culture of preparedness.

When Will We Revisit This Plan?

This is one of the questions emergency planners most often forget to ask. Plans are created for the time in which they were designed and the foreseeable future thereafter. No safety or emergency plan, no matter how comprehensive or excellent it is, is designed to last forever.

That’s why it’s crucial to set a date or year upon which your core safety team will reevaluate and revisit your emergency plans and protocols. Of course, it may also become necessary to update your plans before then, as new predictable threats or hazards present themselves.

How?

How Will We Educate Employees About Our Plan?

Those frequent drills will go a long way to get your employees comfortable with your emergency protocols, but there’s far more employee education that needs to happen. Drills must be backed up by full explanations of emergency protocols and directions for follow-up.

Additionally, it’s important to think about how you will make emergency preparedness plans and resources available to employees on a regular basis.

How Will We Assess the Strength of Our Plan?

Once your plan is fully actualized, you need to track your results with improvement in mind. That means paying close attention to your drills, listening to feedback from first responders and safety consultants, and keeping your ear to the ground for emergency preparedness best practices. The best plan is always a growing, evolving one.

Takeaways

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the general lack of emergency preparedness across businesses. We must seize upon this moment to start planning for the next event and ensuring we have effective protocols in place to address foreseeable emergencies and create a framework to handle the unforeseeable.

Remember:

• Safety preparedness must be owned by a core team, but pulling it off requires the engagement of team- or department-level leadership and ground level employees
• It’s crucial to anticipate and plan for as many different specific scenarios as possible
• Drills and practice (both at the individual team and whole-office levels) are essential to handling a true emergency effectively
• Your emergency plans must evolve over time to stay up to date with needs and best practices

The Employer’s Guide to Social Distancing

by Carolyn Kick | Mar 16, 2020 | COVID-19 Resources

With the rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic, employers around the world are searching for answers as to how they can protect the health of the workforce, maintain some semblance of productivity, and minimize the devastating impact of this novel virus.

The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) have both recommended a policy of social distancing for all people during this complex and crucial time. Unfortunately, while news of the guidance has been well-publicized, there is still a dangerous lack of understanding from individuals and employers when it comes to social distancing.

Our goal here is to clarify the meaning, goals, and best practices for social distancing so employers and HR departments can communicate effectively with their workforces about this guidance and make appropriate decisions for the health of their teams and businesses.

Moving forward, we’ll:

• Define social distancing
• Explain why social distancing is so important to public health right now
• Provide guidance for employers looking to maximize their COVID-19 response

What is Social Distancing?

To put it as simply as possible, social distancing means not getting too close to other people. As a practice, social distancing is designed to reduce vectors for disease through individual isolation.

In the office, social distancing means not shaking hands, not gathering together in board or meeting rooms, and not eating or socializing in communal spaces. Staying at least one meter away from other people is a good practice, but maintaining at least two meters is ideal.

Away from work, social distancing means avoiding all nonessential social interactions. Whether it’s attending a play or sporting event, socializing at the bar, or even shopping at the mall, any preventable social interaction or time in a public space (especially involving more than 10 people) should be avoided.

What’s the Difference Between Social Distancing and Self-Quarantine?

As we’ve said, social distancing is a general practice of avoiding close contact with other people. At this time, everybody should be practicing social distancing.

Self-quarantining is the specific practice of staying home during illness or following exposure to an infected person. At this time, noteverybody needs to self-quarantine. You need to self-quarantine and avoid leaving your home completely if you:

• Have a cough and fever and have been diagnosed with or come into close contact with someone who has been diagnosed with COVID-19
  • You need to quarantine for 7 days past your symptoms ending
• Feel fine but were exposed to someone who has tested positive for COVID-19
  • You need to stay home and avoid all public places and unnecessary social interactions for 14 days

Why is Social Distancing Crucial Right Now?

There’s been a lot of confusing messaging over the last few weeks about best- and worst-case scenarios for COVID-19, but Dr. Asaf Bitton of Ariadne Labs in Boston does a great job articulating why social distancing is key to supporting our healthcare system and preventing the worst-case scenario:

Our health system will not be able to cope with the projected numbers of people who will need acute care should we not muster the fortitude and will to socially distance each other starting now. On a regular day, we have about 45,000 staffed ICU beds nationally, which can be ramped up in a crisis to about 95,000. Even moderate projections suggest that if current infectious trends hold, our capacity (locally and nationally) may be overwhelmed as early as mid-late April. Thus, the only strategies that can get us off this concerning trajectory are those that enable us to work together as a community to maintain public health by staying apart.

As Dr. Bitton explains, we must slow the spread of COVID-19 by creating physical space between one other in the coming weeks. If we cannot take these awkward but sensible measures, hospitals and healthcare facilities could easily become overwhelmed, as has already happened in Italy.

It’s worth mentioning that Italy is only 11 days ahead of the United States when it comes to the first diagnosed case. Given the approximately five-day incubation period of the virus, that means our next few days are absolutely critical.

If employers don’t encourage social distancing and take a break from the traditional office culture for the next month, we risk a national emergency that would touch millions of lives around the country.

What Can Employers Do to Support Social Distancing?

In a perfect world, we’d be able to hit the pause button on business until this public health emergency has been sorted out. Unfortunately, economic realities mean that’s not an option.

In order to proceed safely, however, there are a few things employers need to do to protect their workforces and businesses. Let’s take a look at some simple, proactive measures you can take to support social distancing and keep people healthy:

Provide Employee Education on COVID-19

There are an alarming number of misconceptions and misunderstandings of the COVID-19 pandemic out there. One of the most important things you can do is to set your team straight on what’s fact, what’s fiction, and what’s best practice.

A quick email with links to some clear, useful resources (feel free to share this post with them!) will go a long way to set the tone, help your employees feel more secure, and get things moving in a productive, appropriate direction.

Unlimited PTO

Even if you plan on keeping your office open until the event that official quarantine orders are issued, you absolutely need to keep sick employees and employees with sick family members away from the rest of your team. As we’re already seeing around the nation, there is a hesitancy to do this on the part of many workers (in spite of the greater good) because they either don’t want to or feel they cannot sacrifice their limited PTO.

If you expect your employees to stay away from the office and practice appropriate distancing and self-quarantine, you need to unlock your PTO system and provide your team members with the security they need to protect themselves, their families, their coworkers, and your business.

Enable Remote Work

Unlike the Spanish Flu pandemic of a century ago, COVID-19 is occurring in the age of the internet. That means many employers can practice company-wide social distancing while preserving productivity and some sense of normalcy through remote work.

Remote work allows you to close your office and follow best practices for COVID-19 containment while still continuing operations effectively. You can even preserve the casual and collegial feel of your company culture through eConferencing to create opportunities for meaningful professional and social interactions during this time of social distancing.

Takeaways

The COVID-19 pandemic is evolving from day to day but the time for decisive action by employers has unquestionably come. All businesses must make modifications to their daily routines to support social distancing, enable employees to contribute meaningfully from home, and do their part to limit the spread of this deadly virus.

Remember:

• Social distancing is the practice of maintaining distance between people (preferably at least two meters) and avoiding groups and nonessential interactions
• Social distancing and self-quarantining are not the same thing
  • Everyone should practice social distancing
  • Self-quarantining is only necessary for those sick or exposed
• Practicing social distancing in the coming days is crucial to slowing the spread of COVID-19 and protecting our healthcare system so that it can support everybody’s needs

How to Learn More

If you’re an HR or business leader searching for guidance to help you navigate the COVID-19 pandemic with an eye towards public health, productivity preservation, and employee benefits compliance, you should join Launchways on Friday, March 20 for What Employers Need to Know About the COVID-19 Outbreak.

This one-hour webinar will deliver insight from Launchways’ all-star team of HR and client success experts. Discussion topics will include:

• Understanding the new legislative updates and agency guidance
• Actionable human capital management strategies to address social distancing while maintaining productivity
• HR best practices for pandemic policy and employee communications
• How COVID-19 connects to/affects your employee benefits offerings
• Regulations and compliance expectations from OSHA, COBRA, FMLA, etc.

Our team is updating their webinar plan throughout the week to reflect the latest news, statistics, and federal and local guidance. That means this session will be the definitive source for HR and operational recommendations based on the progression of the pandemic. To save your seat at What Employers Need to Know About the COVID-19 Outbreak, sign up today!

How to Manage a Remote Workforce

by Carolyn Kick | Mar 16, 2020 | COVID-19 Resources

With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses who previously resisted work-from-home strategies are diving into the deep end of the remote work pool. In order to minimize COVID-19’s impact on the economy, workforce, and country generally, businesses of all sizes and industries need to adopt best practices for remote work quickly.

For many veteran supervisors, managing remote employees presents significant new challenges. With in-person check-in opportunities removed, it can feel hard to maintain an authentic finger on the pulse of ongoing work. In fact, that disconnection from the traditional work experience is why so many organizations (even in cutting-edge fields like technology and the sciences) have resisted remote work.

Our goal today is to provide a quick introduction and best practices guide for businesses and supervisors embracing remote work for the first time or scaling up their work-from-home program quickly. Moving forward we’ll:

• Introduce remote work enablement considerations businesses need to address to succeed
• Describe best practices for managing remote team members

What Can Businesses Do to Set Remote Workers Up for Success?

In the face of decentralization, we have to think about how we can replicate the “ideal” work environment right in each individual employee’s home.

Accessibility to Work Tools & Data

In order for remote workers to maintain their productivity, they need access to the same applications and databases that a traditional in-office worker would need.

At the same time, working from home or another remote setting shouldn’t feel like jumping through hoops. The more clicks, steps, logins, and downloads there are, the more potential points of frustration, disengagement, or breakdown are built into the system.

This is especially true for new remote workers. If someone is used to their in-office setup and has never worked from home before, they will likely experience IT or accessibility gaps. For example, many professionals can access their email at work with no problem thanks to repetition and shortcuts; but many of those same folks might find it far more complex to access work email from their home computer or a new device.

If you expect employees to do great work from afar, you need to extend the full functionality and accountability of the office to them. With that structure and consistency of experience in place, you can reasonably expect people to maintain productivity.

How Businesses Enable Remote Work

Any new or ad hoc remote work programs must account for and seek to minimize gaps in experience, navigational difficulties, and potential dead ends. Here are a few popular IT strategies businesses can use to extend the in-office experience to the home:

• Virtual Private Network (VPN): A VPN securely connects users’ home computers directly to your in-office network. Employees see things exactly as they would from their work computer.
  • Advantages: Security; continuity of experience from the office
  • Disadvantages: Navigation and download/upload can be complex or confusing, especially for new users
• Mobile Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Solutions: A mobile ERP extends the full functionality of your business’ work enablement, project management, and supervisor interfaces to a cell phone or tablet, increasing accessibility from a variety of locations and devices
  • Advantages: Agnostic accessibility; full in-office functionality; potential for customization
  • Disadvantages: Price
• Microsoft Office 365: Office 365 provides all the Office tools your workers are familiar with (Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) in an accessible, cloud-based, easy-to-use form.
  • Advantages: Well-rounded basic toolkit; provides apps people are comfortable with; enables document sharing
  • Disadvantages: Lack of personalization/customization

The Power of Single Sign-On (SSO)

Regardless of which software solution you use to extend the office experience to your employees’ homes, it’s always a best practice to provide a Single Sign-On (SSO) experience. With an SSO system, your employees only need to remember one login and password, which means they can navigate your systems and get work done in a much more agile way.

As we’ve said before, the better you can streamline the process of getting to and completing work, the better work your remote employees will deliver.

Maximizing Visibility with Effective Communication

When all your employees are in one building, it’s pretty easy to spread a message. You can send a mass email, send runners around the office, or even make an open announcement. In a remote work scenario, that immediacy and visibility of communication can disappear without the right approach in place.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but the best way to ensure decentralized workers all get the same message is through centralized communication. Centralized communication can take two general forms: either using a single official channel or embracing an omnichannel strategy.

Establishing a Single, Official Communication Channel

By establishing an official channel, you create a single, consistent expectation that everybody will use email, your online chat board, or whatever channel you have chosen to send and receive work-related information.

A single-channel approach creates consistency, but it also creates gaps in the experience. For example, Employee A might check hit refresh on her email every half hour and have her cell phone configured to send her immediate alerts about incoming messages. Employee B, on the other hand, might only check his emails every four hours when he is moving between projects or tasks. There’s a significant difference between the immediacy and effectiveness with which each of those employees will be able to digest and act based on that message.

Embracing an Omnichannel Strategy

When you create an omnichannel experience, you provide the same messaging and immediacy across a variety of channels. Emails, chat boards, SMS text messages, and even automated calls can be connected to ensure everybody is reached in the way that makes the most sense for them.

In the above example, an omnichannel strategy would ensure both Employee A and Employee B saw the message at the same time, even if Employee B was not a vigilant email user. An important message could be pushed to Employee B via text or an automated phone call to guarantee visibility.

As you acquire or transition new remote workers, it’s important to understand their preferred communication channels so that you can determine how best to communicate with them and hold them accountable consistently.

Management Best Practices for Remote Work

To a certain degree, management is management. The communication, incentivization, and accountability strategies you apply to the employees you see in person every day should be extended to your remote employees as well.

With that said, getting there can be tough, especially if you’ve been managing a traditional on-premise team for years and this is all new to you. Let’s explore a few best practices you can leverage to get the most out of your remote team members and turn yourself into a high-functioning remote manager:

Use a Formal Productivity Management System

By embracing remote work, you’ve given up your ability to stand over employees’ shoulders or get the constant informal check-ins you’re used to. However, that doesn’t mean sacrificing your own awareness of projects and teams you’re managing.

By using a formal project management or productivity system (like Trello, Jira, or Asana), you establish a framework for formalized check-ins, document sharing, and necessary conversations about project or team updates. With a productivity management system in place, you create a constant flow of incoming updates, feedback, and action items for your team, replicating the in-person work experience for remote team members.

Provide & Require Clear, Timely Communication

Communication is everything in management, but it’s extra crucial when it comes to managing remote employees. Expectations for each team member must be clear at the beginning of any projects as well as at every step along the way, or you’ll quickly find yourself stuck in pointless check-in meetings where there’s nothing new to check in about.

Whether you embrace email, an omnichannel strategy, or proactive ticket-passing using a productivity system, it’s absolutely crucial you proactively reach out to employees and encourage them to reach out to you so you can manage as an effective hub of operations.

Embrace Remote Conferencing While Minimizing Meetings

When they’re used right, conferencing apps like Zoom and Citrix GoToMeeting are ideal for managing and communicating with a remote team. Using an eConferencing app, you can open a lobby for a weekly whole-group check-in, embrace opportunities to review materials together using screen sharing, or recreate the lively feel of office work for temporary remote team members who might be missing it.

At the same time, however, meetings over conferencing bridges can get long, repetitive, and tangent-ridden if you’re not careful. When that happens, it eats into your remote team’s time for actual productivity and hurts their buy-in (because nobody wants to sit there in a meeting with headphones on for over an hour!). Conferencing applications are powerful remote management tools, but it’s crucial each meeting has a clear purpose and goals going into it and team member-specific action items going out.

Remember: Remote Workers are People Too!

Unfortunately, the thing that often gets lost in remote work is the humanity. As we increase the physical distance between supervisors and employees, we decrease our ability to see each other as people.

That means, regrettably, it’s easier for remote workers to see their managers as pesky or distant, and it’s easier for managers to see their remote workers as unresponsive or lazy. Preventing that breakdown requires a consistent effort by everybody to treat the team as a true interdependent community, not just a lose collection of people around a region, country, or planet.

Forge & Build on Authentic Relationships with Remote Workers

When you have a new employee in your office, you usually put in effort to get to know them. The same must be true for remote workers. Too often, remote workers miss out on the candor and personal connections that occur in a physical office environment.

The stronger your relationship with your remote workers, the more honesty and candor you’ll get from them. That translates directly to the best possible understanding of what’s going on, where it needs to go, and how you can help guide and support the work from a management perspective.

You can’t let your relationships with traditional office workers erode while they’re working remotely for public or personal health. While you may not be able to have the same personal interactions, you can at least drop them a friendly email occasionally to check in and show them that even though you no longer see them on a daily basis, you still think about their wellbeing regularly.

Don’t Let High Team Function Hide Individual Struggles

When you’re managing a decentralized or remote team, it’s easy to fall into the trap of tracking overall progress but forgetting to check in with individuals frequently. This can lead to a situation where an employee is feeling overwhelmed and burnt out while hiding in plain sight.

Being a great remote manager is a little like being a great engineer: you have to consider both the whole system and its individual pieces very closely. Managing proactively requires attention to detail, open channels of communication with all team members, and an understanding that, just like folks in the office, remote workers are people who experience day-to-day fluctuations and struggles as well.

Takeaways

Remote work is the way of the future, but thanks to the aggressive spread of the COVID-19 outbreak, businesses across America are getting a taste of remote work’s true capabilities right now. In the short-term, remote work best practices can help businesses navigate this crucial moment in history and maintain productivity. In the long term, embracing these strategies in a proactive way will help progressive organizations succeed for decades to come.

Remember:

• Remote workers need access to their work applications, tools, and databases
  • The more it feels like the traditional in-office experience, the better
  • VPNs, mobile ERPs, and other IT solutions can help close those gaps and enable great work
• Communication is especially important to being a great remote manager
  • Set expectations, establish clear channels, and monitor progress closely
• Formal productivity management systems create a framework for success
• It’s crucial you focus on the humanity of your remote workers and treat them just like you would employees in your office

How to Learn More

If you’re an HR or business leader searching for guidance to help you navigate the COVID-19 pandemic with an eye towards public health, productivity preservation, and employee benefits compliance, you should join Launchways on Friday, March 20 for What Employers Need to Know About the COVID-19 Outbreak.

This one-hour webinar will deliver insight from Launchways’ all-star team of HR and client success experts. Discussion topics will include:

• Understanding the new legislative updates and agency guidance
• Actionable human capital management strategies to address social distancing while maintaining productivity
• HR best practices for pandemic policy and employee communications
• How COVID-19 connects to/affects your employee benefits offerings
• Regulations and compliance expectations from OSHA, COBRA, FMLA, etc.

Our team is updating their webinar plan throughout the week to reflect the latest news, statistics, and federal and local guidance. That means this session will be the definitive source for HR and operational recommendations based on the progression of the pandemic. To save your seat at What Employers Need to Know About the COVID-19 Outbreak, sign up today!