Crises, disasters and continuity of business

Recent events in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia were thrown into perspective when Harry Puckering, one of Oakwood’s directors had to cut short a CPP Module because of some modest civil unrest. Harry is now safely at home with his family.

But one thought that pops up is ‘Does your organisation have a plan for how to continue operations and business in a crisis or disaster?’ And, if so, does the plan take account of the differing needs of the various Human Resources (i.e. people) in your organisation?

If you work in a very large organisation running critical operations, such as in the petrochemical, aviation and finance sectors for example, the answer to both questions is almost certainly ‘Yes!’ But for smaller, private organisations the answer may well be ‘I don’t know.’ or even ‘No.’ The needs of locals and nationals are possibly different to those of resident ex-patriots. Different groups of nationals and ex-pats may have entirely separate needs too (based, for example, on where their homes are or what their family circumstances are). And short-term contractors and consultants (such as trainers!) may need handling differently too.

Clearly, whilst in crisis, we must do the best we can – putting staff safety and open communications at the top of the agenda. But once the situation starts to calm down, we must capture the learning from events, the way we handled them, and change or alter our plans for the future.

How about we make a commitment to pull together the key HR players and run a meeting based on the GROW model, to review the effectiveness of the decisions and actions taken in the crisis:

• GOALS and OBJECTIVES. What were the values, principles and assumptions that informed people’s decisions and actions in the crisis? How well did these connect to the organisational goals and the needs of the crisis? What do we want to happen next time?
• REALITY. What did people actually do? What was the precise timeline of events? How well did their actions follow the plan and the values, principles and assumptions that informed it? What did they do that was unplanned or unexpected? Were the right people involved? How well were communications during the crisis? Did people have the resources they needed? What helped people? What obstacles and barriers got in their way?
• OPTIONS. What could be done in future? How do the values, principles and assumptions need to change? How does the plan need to change? Who needs to be involved? What is best practice? What other organisations can the organisation benchmark itself against? What would we do differently – and why?
• WILL, WHO and WHEN. Who takes responsibility for the action plan? When does the new plan ‘go live’? How will we measure success next time?

So, when the dust clears, try to make sure that the next crisis will be handled better than the last crisis.