Business continuity planning: the human side

Downtime is expensive. A Meta Group study indicates that the cost per hour for downtime – ranging from simple network outages to major emergencies – in the financial services sector is, on average, $1.4 million – each hour. After a series of major events over the past few years and a growing recognition of associated costs, many organizations have become aware of the need to implement resilient capabilities within their communications and IT systems.

Today’s business continuity plans include redundant data centers, redundant telecommunications capabilities, and redundant IT resources. While these components are integral to maintaining a viable emergency plan, they ultimately overlook the most critical component of your business – your people.

In an event of any magnitude, your communications networks may perform flawlessly, and your systems may be humming with up-to-date information at a remote data center. Data systems, IT infrastructure and communications are running. From a technology and IT standpoint, you’re in business.

Or, are you? Before you can actually perform as a business, or manage ongoing supply chain relationships, or even make critical decisions during the often-changing nature of events, your workforce must similarly be protected and back on line. This is critical, not just in terms of protecting your people and keeping them informed, but also in terms of quantifiable losses that will occur when you fail to involve this component in your planning efforts.

To manage your business effectively during an event, you must be able to “protect and connect” the people whose work is what actually generates business profits and continuity. Managing IT systems outages is critical – it’s extremely expensive when your systems are down. But failure to effectively plan for management of your human capital can be even more expensive. Consider that you may have your data centers and core technology infrastructure up and running, but your workforce may be unable to communicate or connect. Issues then arise, such as:

• Absenteeism or sheer inability to reach the office causing lost worker productivity
• Critical decision-making hierarchies causing breaks in continuity that prevent rapid, flexible response to the changing nature of an event.
• Key staff who may be out of touch jeopardizing supply chain and even customer relationships.
  Planning that takes these issues into account might be termed the human side of Business Continuity Planning, or workforce continuity. Given that the Society for Human Resource Management found during a recent study that barely one third of organizations indicated human resources were a significant component of their business continuity planning , this is clearly an under-planned area.

Improvements in this area can yield significant benefits, not only to staff morale and even safety, but to organizational resilience during an emergency.

Resilience is more than Data and Infrastructure
Despite the critical nature of managing the human dimension during an event, a recent Forrester study of NA and European BC planners and decision makers showed that while almost 70% of their organizations have plans in place to recover data centers and communications, less than 25% of them feel that they have planned to support and recover their workforces.
The Forrester report also stresses that “workforce continuity” must be integrated into any successful Business Continuity plan. Workforce continuity is defined as:

A strategy that provides for connecting a disbursed workforce to the applications, data and communications they need in instances where pandemic, transit strike, natural disaster, or other event prevent the workforce from reaching a corporate facility.

Organizations must take this concept one step further, and provide the means to communicate effectively with their workforce, using a blend of both inbound and outbound communications. Doing so will provide greater connectivity with others in the organization, while enabling communication about the more macro-level events that may be happening in the world.
This blended communications methodology provides your workforce with a basic understanding of the nature, scope and details of the event, and enables communication within the organization, as well as external communications with customers, supply chain partners, and local emergency management personnel. Given the importance of workforce continuity, integrating outbound and inbound communications must be considered a cornerstone of successful business continuity planning.

Blended Communications Adds to Resilience
A key element of a comprehensive workforce continuity plan as outlined in the Forrester study is the need for an emergency communication and notification system. This system links the organization to workers and enable the delivery of critical corporate communication and the tracking of worker status and well being. But there’s more to an effective emergency communication and notification system than a set of recorded outbound messages, however well timed and carefully crafted.

For maximum effectiveness, communication systems associated with workforce continuity planning must blend both inbound and outbound communications capabilities. Outbound communications are critical for notifying workers of an unplanned event, providing accurate, tension-defusing information, and delivering critical status information. Inbound communications enable workers to report on status and well being from the field, to let others know of urgent needs, provide on the spot assessments of work-readiness in the field – in short, inbound communications aid organizations in developing a real-time “picture” of what’s happening with employees. This provides a further safety net for workers, both from an organizational and psychological standpoint

Business continuity planners and executives have experienced first hand the limitations of outbound only communications while attempting to manage and mitigate the natural and manmade disasters of the past few years have shown the limitations of an outbound-only communications approach. These include:

• Employees may be widely dispersed and unreachable due to lack of access to email or phones.
• Physical meeting points may be inaccessible.
• Facilities from which outbound communications are to originate may be damaged, destroyed or inaccessible.
• Outbound notifications have a limited period of usefulness.

From our experience with disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, we have learned that effective emergency communications cannot be a one-way street. In addition to being able to reach out to constituents rapidly and effectively, through a variety of channels, we must also provide a reliable method for receiving critical updates and other information from employees, customers, and other stakeholders on the ground during the thick of the crisis.

People are “social animals”. We derive much of our sense of safety, control and connectivity from the social groups to which we belong. In today’s world, individuals’ work connections form an important part of this overarching social need. Meeting these basic needs by providing multiple channels of inbound and outbound communications will help and protect your people Placing your people and their needs first is not just the right thing to do – it’s a critical enabler of organizational continuity during an emergency.

Effective Communications Planning – Best Processes and Practices
Effective communications management is a keystone to business continuity planning. When combined with experience-derived best practice information it can maximize communication effectiveness. These best prctices are all based on a blending of inbound and outbound communications that enables not only resilient business communications, but also helps provide a “social” infrastructure that offers a soft landing in hard times. It’s important to keep in mind that every element of your crisis communications strategy must first consider the people side of communications – not just data that needs to be broadcast.

A Virtual Rally Point Combining Information and Connection
One key capability gained by blending outbound and inbound communications is that of a “virtual rally point” – a message center – think of it as a virtual whiteboard accessible through a range of channels – that can manage inevitable spikes in traffic as employees, customers, partners and others attempt to learn what’s happening and understand what they need to do.
To deliver this type of virtual message center, organizations are turning to fully managed communications services that provide both the bandwidth and the communications expertise necessary for successful deployment – without the intensive upfront capital outlays. This model is sometimes termed “Software as a Service” (SaaS).

Properly designed, the outbound component, by providing clear, useful information on demand, minimizes the bursting number of inbound calls, primarily from individuals simply asking “what’s going on?” or “what should I do?” while the inbound component offers customized information to callers, the ability to leave messages, or requests for assistance, all supported by a robust reporting capability that enables the organization to more effectively manage resources, more clearly understand where help is most required, and generally focus resources and energy on the people and assets most in need of assistance.

Fully managed solutions, with their built-in redundant infrastructure, geographically redundant data centers and communications providers, are explicitly designed to manage not only the delivery of outbound, “informational” communications, but to cope with bursts of inbound calls from worried, isolated staff.

And, by judiciously automating key communication tasks using existing data driven, interactive technologies, these “rally points” can be employed as a cost effective strategy that both complements and augments other elements of your business continuity plan.

Your communications solution is an element of your communications plan
Once you have implemented an automated, blended communications solution as a component of your business continuity planning, you will then be able to respond rapidly – often in real time -- to events during evolving situations. But, like most technology solutions, the devil is in the details.

Simply implementing a solution as described above will not in itself deliver the protection, the psychological safety net that helps create a sense of control and understanding. Effectively prepared organizations have found that they need to:

• Publicize their plans to employees and other stakeholders
• Test and evaluate their plans on a regular basis
• Adapt and evolve plans as new information becomes available
• Evolve communications that protect people and assets, and keep affected constituents closely informed of changes

An effective, well-publicized, regularly tested emergency communications plan forms the backbone of organizational business continuity planning. Successful plans evolve to provide employees and other key stakeholders with a sense of control and context, along with accurate, cleanly and consistently delivered information.

As this track of planning proceeds, it provides a workable context – a context that enables employees and other key stakeholders to devote additional attention to those tasks and needs more closely focused on business operations, supply chain relationships, and ongoing, day-to-day functionality.

Ultimately, developing an effective communications plan that supports the human side of a business continuity will;

• Protect people more effectively
• Deliver rapid, effective, two-way communications that enable adaptive response to evolving or emerging crises.
• Help minimize potential loss of assets or data
• Enable business resiliency with supply chain operations

Crisis Communications plans — works in progress
Crisis communication plans will always be works in progress. And – that’s a good thing. By their very nature, emergency events are unpredictable and cannot reasonably be addressed by a cookie-cutter plan – even the most thoughtfully designed plan will stall out when confronted by an event outside its design parameters.

Instead, by focusing on your people and the full spectrum of their needs, you not only help them – you enable and empower them to respond to situations as flexibly as possible. Informed, connected employees whose human needs and concerns are being met form the indispensable foundation of organizational resilience.