You never know when an emergency might arise. Has your business made a plan if one was to happen? Do your employees know what to do if there was an emergency? It’s not something we often stop to consider, but we all should have an emergency preparedness plan for our businesses.
According to Ready.gov there are five steps in developing a preparedness program.
- Program Management
- Organize, develop and administer your preparedness program
- Identify regulations that establish minimum requirements for your program
- Planning
- Gather information about hazards and assess risks
- Conduct a business impact analysis (BIA)
- Examine ways to prevent hazards and reduce risks
- Implementation
Write a preparedness plan addressing:- Resource management
- Emergency response
- Crisis communications
- Business continuity
- Information technology
- Employee assistance
- Incident management
- Training
- Testing and Exercises
- Test and evaluate your plan
- Define different types of exercises
- Learn how to conduct exercises
- Use exercise results to evaluate the effectiveness of the plan
- Program Improvement
- Identify when the preparedness program needs to be reviewed
- Discover methods to evaluate the preparedness program
- Utilize the review to make necessary changes and plan improvements