Protecting Your People Post Pandemic—with a Plan

What are you and your employees feeling while coping with the COVID-19 crisis—disruption, uncertainty, fear, sadness, stress, anxiety, empathy, community, cooperation, or a combination of any, all, or other emotions? A devastating emergency like the coronavirus pandemic teaches us how important it is to work together. In all emergencies, we must integrate individual functions with multi-entity operations. That means we have to collaborate internally with all departments of our organization as well as externally with first responders like police, fire, public and mental health, and medical services in order to protect our employees.

Especially during May’s Mental Health Awareness month, business psychologist Dino Signore, PhD puts our emotions in perspective in 8 steps to navigating uncertainty. “We want to regulate our emotions and behavior when it’s appropriate and to surrender when it’s not,” he writes. “A psychological term, ‘surrender,’ shouldn’t be mistaken for helplessness, giving up or becoming a victim. Instead, surrendering means you make the decision to let go of things you cannot control and focus on the things you can control.”

So what can you do during these uncertain times? You can focus on controlling your response and recovery efforts to the pandemic and its impact on your operations and employees by creating or enhancing a holistic all-hazards emergency management plan (EMP). In fact, the EMP not only addresses your response and recovery initiatives but also the prevention/mitigation and preparedness measures you’ll need for the next emergency you’ll face.

An Emergency Management Plan Covers All Hazards

Before, during, and after emergencies caused by all hazards including weather, criminal activity, accidents, and public health crises, a plan implements the four phases of emergency management as defined by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and FEMA to prevent injuries, save lives, minimize property damage, decrease liability, and help restore operations.

Phase 1: Prevention and Mitigation

Prevention and mitigation includes any activities that are preventative, reduce the chance of an emergency happening, or mitigate the damaging effects of unavoidable emergencies. Beginning with an assessment of your current security capabilities, you’ll identify what you have and what you need. By reviewing the physical security measures, security technologies, policies, procedures, incident reporting protocols, emergency management documents, and personnel staffing and support, you’ll also understand your level of risk and how your workplace exposes your employees to potential harm.

Think about your organization and how well you protect employees with:

  • Physical measures including barriers, keys, locks, fencing, and landscaping
  • Technical systems including cameras, card readers, alarms, and biometrics
  • Procedural processes including active shooter plans, workplace violence policies, and background screening
  • Personnel support including from your security department, security officers, and liaison with first responders.

Phase 2: Preparedness  

Preparedness details the measures you need to prepare for an emergency and an updated plan details how you can properly prepare, plan, and train to respond to a crisis. If your organization has an emergency management plan and you train your employees on it, your people will know what to do when they face the unexpected. After determining the resources and skill sets you need from internal partners including security, legal, emergency management, and HR and external stakeholders including police, fire, and emergency medical, you can establish a training curriculum that prepares your workforce for their roles and responsibilities during an event and how they will coordinate and integrate with first responders.

Training is at the heart of preparedness—active shooter and fire drills familiarize employees with the emergency evacuation routes, safe rooms, and lockdown and weather event exercises involve stocking items like water, food, and blankets for shelter-in-place. Your training strategy focuses on how employee activities, building management, daily operations, access control, visitor management, emergency preparedness, and incident response work together to ensure safety during and after an emergency.

Phase 3: Response

A Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) survey in April found that most organizations were not prepared to respond to the pandemic and 1/3 did not have an EMP—making them vulnerable to loss of productivity, operational lapses, and potential tragic injuries or death to any emergency they will face. We’ve heard that some organizations have downloaded their plans from the Internet, haven’t updated their plans for years, or don’t train their employees on the plan. Those are not holistic all hazards EMPs.

In order to keep your employees safe, your EMP must be customized to your location and:

  • Specifically identify evacuation routes, assembly areas, and safe rooms
  • Outline roles your emergency management team will assume in an emergency
  • Coordinate with first responders, specifically police and fire
  • Ensure effective communication with employees, first responders, and stakeholders

A comprehensive plan focuses on many more areas you’ll need to consider to accomplish your mission of protecting your people.

Phase 4: Recovery

Because all emergency incidents cause disruption, possibly across an entire enterprise or institution, an effective recovery strategy and continuity of operations planning will increase resiliency and ensure you can continue to provide essential functions and services during and after an emergency.

How soon will you recover from an incident? You need to determine your organization’s competency level for mitigating an emergency:

  • Do you have memorandums of understanding (MOUs) or mutual aid agreements (MAAs) in place with public and private organizations to provide the necessary resources?
  • Do your strategies align with the four phases of emergency management (prevention/mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery)?
  • Do you have a property-specific emergency management plan in full compliance with the National Incident Management System (NIMS) and the Incident Command System (ICS)?
  • Through either training or an actual event, are you constantly reviewing the effectiveness of your plan by testing, reviewing, evaluating, modifying, implementing, and repeating the cycle?
  • Do you have a process in place to implement an after action review to identify lessons learned from the current crisis and apply them to your updated plan to address all hazards?

We’re Here to Help
You are committed to protecting your employees. We can work with you to construct a tailored emergency management plan that does just that. Or we can discuss whatever is on your mind in a free 30-minute consultation. Contact me at [email protected] or 312.515.8747 and together we can ensure a safe workplace where your employees can do their best work.


An After Action Review Helps Your Business Continue

The impact of COVID-19 on our country affects not only the health of our citizens but also the strength and well-being of our business community. The results of our survey last month coupled with continued conversations with colleagues reveal that most organizations are concerned with how to move toward recovery.

After the stay-at-home restrictions are lifted and business activities resume, organizations will need to evaluate how well they responded to this emergency to determine if they were adequately prepared to continue their operations, support their employees, and service their clients and customers.

One essential tool that helps companies of all types and sizes, across all industries, assess their preparedness, response, and recovery to COVID-19 and all emergencies is the after action review (AAR) process. We’ll show you how to use this process to improve the performance of your entire organization regarding not only emergency incidents but also events and projects.

The AAR process provides an opportunity for you as part of your organization’s leadership to assess what worked, what didn’t, and why, the current resource capabilities in place and those you lack, what you need to change, and how you can move toward improvement. Simply put, this learning-focused process is designed to help you discover what went well and what could be done differently. The nature and size of an incident determine the amount of time you need to complete the AAR process and move toward recovery.

The AAR process generates improved communication and feedback between departments within an organization as well as with external stakeholders such as first responders and specialists including subject matter experts. Because the focus is on lessons learned, the process leads to an improved understanding of organizational performance and helps decision-makers think about how best to work together to produce better results. While the AAR process does not seek to find fault, it emphasizes learning and review to achieve maximum involvement, openness, honesty, and improvement as it renews the cycle—test, review, evaluate, modify, implement, repeat.

So, when do you begin your after action review? You can implement it as soon as possible, even during an emergency or an event, so that your team’s observations and feedback are fresh and accurately describe what happened and how you responded.

And how do you get started? Your review process will produce an after action report that summarizes what took place during the event, analyzes the actions taken by participants, and identifies areas of improvement. The after action report can follow this suggested framework and you can improve data collection and analysis by distributing a questionnaire to each department so that you receive pertinent information uniformly:

  1. When the review was completed (during an incident, after it, or both)
  2. Who participated in the review including job title and department. You’ll need to get feedback through interviews of key personnel from all departments of your organization, such as HR, IT, facilities, security, sales, marketing, operations, and finance.
  3. How the incident impacted the organization with a summary from each department that includes a timeline of events, the response procedures that the department took, who did what in each department so you can identify roles and responsibilities, the recovery measures each person rolled out, and the effects of the incident on continuity operations.
  4. Identify what went well and why, specifically the successful steps each department took in response to the incident.
  5. Identify what could have been done better and the deficiencies that you must address to ensure an improved scenario in the future. What advice would you give to future AAR process stakeholders?
  6. Determine your improvement plan and how you will implement corrective actions and the responsible parties and estimated completion dates.
  7. Prepare to repeat the cycle with this incident and the others that you will inevitably face.

I have participated in a number of AAR meetings, and one of the most memorable occurred after the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. As you can imagine, it was quite an extensive process and we reviewed an exhaustive list that covered a multitude of security measures including equipment requirements, air space restrictions, badging procedures, and security post positions. The bottom line is you can use the AAR process as an invaluable resource to prepare for any emergency or evaluate any event or project because the fundamentals are the same no matter how large or small the incident is—identify what worked and what didn’t and continue with what worked and fix what didn’t.

Many organizations have found that an outside professional with an AAR process background can facilitate the process more effectively because they can be objective and focus on best practices from their previous experiences. Because you lived through your incident, you are more influenced by emotion, personal connections with your co-workers, and the potential trauma of the incident itself. Your goal is to evaluate effectively and learn—so you are prepared.