Online activity 11.4

Overview

The Disaster Resource website is devoted to disaster recovery and emergency (or crisis) management.  It has a wide range of resources, but this exercise focuses on how to manage employees in a crisis situation.

Activity Description

The focus of emergency planning can often be very functional – how to ensure the business activities are continued, how to safeguard data, and where to relocate to.  But a crisis, emergency or disaster is typically going to have a human impact, notably on employees.  This exercise provides some insight into these people issues and how to manage them.  It consists of experts in this field talking about their experience of how to manage the workforce.
Watch the following videos from this website:

• Gerry Lewis – what is often overlooked when addressing workforce issues?
• Ted brown – the difference between disaster recovery and business continuity and human resource issues.
• Bruce Blyth – what is a mental model for responding to effectively to an incident or disruption?

Employees can be prepared for emergencies by practising for these.  A simple example is preparing for a fire by having a practice evacuation of the building.  But some organisations have very much more sophisticated, and less frequent, ‘disaster exercises’.  This is often the case in the public sector which have to prepare workers in the emergency services for major events, such as floods and riots.
Consider:

• What is the impact of a crisis on the workforce??
• What can operators do to reduce these effects?

Website
Disaster Resource Guide: http://www.disaster-resource.com/
Gerry Lewis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oDLMs11Exs
Ted Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMQJsjVD7sg
Bruce Blyth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmKcO5bA2dE