Continuity Central pandemic planning survey results: PART 2 This week we publish the final section of the survey. This asked respondents who had already included pandemic scenarios in business continuity plans to provide some information on the measures included in the BCP. These are available below, in no particular order and are verbatim except to change spelling errors.
Loss of staff is not covered in our plans; this is an area we can not control, be it pandemic or any other major risk. Awareness Campaign for employees (includes personal hygiene, work station sanitation practices, immune system boosters, vitamin supplements, use of particulate mask respirators, telework capability in most extreme circumstances). Purchase hand sanitizers and place in restrooms and break room. Encourage pneumonia and flu vaccinations (concerned about this mitigation step).
Surveillance, communications, protective measures, scaling back non critical operations A task force has recently been established to evaluate likely impacts and response options and to liaise with relevant governmental agencies - a first step!
Having difficulty in seeing how we can mitigate against it due to small geographic area - an island.
We have tie ups with best of the hospitals around the country, a well placed procedure to execute. We even educate our employees on how to act in case of a pandemic disaster. We are multilocated even within our country.
Addressing regulatory issues. Internally, we are addressing staff protection, staff management, communication and process shutdown issues. Our Plans are not event specific. Resources lost rather than how they were lost is important to us. Senior management of our company does not see a pandemic as a real threat.
I am not at all sure if senior executives appreciate the potential impacts of a pandemic. The Spanish Flu of 1918-1919 is remote. I suspect that many think that flu shots will be enough to keep their workforce working.
Split production and home working response plans. Staff quarantine policies drafted. Staff communication strategy being developed. Building hygiene protocols developed. Chair a number of Pandemic working groups to ensure suitable benchmarking.
Pandemic planning is a special case situation where up to 30% of staff may not be available. Thus, continuity work is helpful to inform the approach to which critical functions to focus on and what skills need to be developed through cross-training. Resumption/continuity plans alone will not effectively address pandemic situations. As well, a pandemic will affect many of the groups one's normal BCM plans depend on. Also linking to the local health agency responsible for regional pandemic planning will be key as the situation could evolve slowly and erratically.
We conducted an Emergency Operations Team tabletop with the scenario being a pandemic ‘a la avian flu’. There were several out comes which were indicative of trying to grapple with the unfathomable possibility of 25-50% of your workforce and business partners being affected. Results: 1) It was realized that the depth of technical expertise was very thin. Too many single points of failure. It was assumed that the technical infrastructure would probably "run on its own" for a while. The team realized that should a critical component of the infrastructure caused a business continuance issue it may take a while to resolve. Thus manual work-arounds need to be reassessed. 2) Telecommuting was offered as a solution to "keep people working" while in quarantine-like situations. 3) Given, we are a Health Insurance company, it was strongly emphasized that the interdependencies with hospitals and other providers demanded that we don’t restrict care if we were unable to provide verification of coverage. It was understood that after the pandemic we would get with our business partners to resolve any discrepancies. 4) It was also realized that we needed to expect the worse and address that as a possibility. Thus far, the worst case scenario has yet to addressed at our company. For if Quarantine was indeed imposed, how could workers report to work? Again, telecommuting offers some sort of solution but the technical infrastructure for us and as well as the entire community would be strained if not ineffectual. So we had more questions about continuity in the worst case scenario than solutions. The scope of the incident was really beyond our ability to comprehend thus solutions were not readily arrived at.
Our plans do consider the unavailability of a majority of our business-key people due to a multiple of reasons. But pandemic risks are a threat for the whole population in and outside the organization. I believe good health-care prevention with medical precautions-programs are mainly the answer and the responsibility of human-resource/people-care departments.
We are working with local health services for staff protection. Company established work from home capabilities in the event of family illness. Promote wellness fairs and brown bag discussions to proactively address health matters.
We are considering remote sites and home access in the event access to public facilities is limited.
Measures to limit spread of any infection internally, possibly restricting staff travel. Provisions for stopping large organised events that we run. Identification of staff particularly at risk.
Preparing managers to think what scale of reduced service we could/should run.
All business units fully independent. All data held on duplicated websites. Critical staff never meet face-to-face. No critical resource depends on one specific person or place. All financial transactions in Euro.
The crisis management planners have started talking about the pandemic issues. Nobody knows the right solution to it, but we have started working on split functionality, locally and globally.
Committee formed in June to address employee wellness, operational impact and financial impact (investments and product). Several presentations to senior management already made on the Avian Flu and our approach.
Principle activities to date are monitoring the situation by me (risk manager based in UK) and sharing essential with regional management in Asia. They are aware of the issue from local press and experienced SARS and remember how we coped and what we could have done better. Our view is that until the virus mutates so that it infects a wider range of people (ie not just those who live and work closely with fowl) then we will continue to just monitor and not take any action yet.
Considering: purchase of vaccine, home working, sickness policy changes
We have supplied Tamiflu to all staff in our offices in the Far East, and are currently considering ordering further supplies either for all other offices or for all those countries unable to offer a standard of health care equivalent to that of the NHS. Guidance will be available shortly on our intranet site on precautionary measures such as home-working.
Each business unit has delivered 3 different contingency plans for the cases that the officers, or the employees, or all personnel of that business unit will be unexpectedly not available for a lengthy amount of time because of accidents, diseases, etc.
Incident management, crisis management & communication & HR Plans have all been adapted. Solutions for the transfer of activities to other geographical locations in-progress
Mutual aid, transport for staff, retroviral drug distribution, staff working from home, emergency cover by some staff for others. Some of these were already planned within "critical" BC plans and others are being included.
Strategies are being developed for deploying available resources from non-essential work so as to maintain critical services.
We have conducted briefing sessions for all divisions in response to requests from the state and federal health departments.
Full Infectious Disease Plan for all locations and associated training.
Global team formed to firm up threat assessment - includes medicos and business folk.
A pandemic is just one factor that should be considered along with a multitude of others. We have not built a specific pandemic response plan - instead we have designed our response plans around the outcome - ie, no staff, inability to travel, quarantines on shipments, etc. This, by the way, is the same potential for terrorism, etc.
Pandemic Crisis Management Exercises and rehearsals
Resources through medical department, internal communications, constant surveillance, offer annual flu shot to employees, guidance on travel, long and short term planning.
Provided staff with early warning steps to take, steps to take during the event and after the event, accompanied by a very coordinated effort with the organization's top management, health & safety team, corporate communications and maintaining links with local/international community in an effort to contain the spread and minimize the impact on the availability of human resources.
Critical business process identification, level of service that must be maintained, alternate staffing requirements & arrangements, minimum training requirements for alternate staff, employee issues, policy decisions, health issues, prevention/mitigation issues.
Bolster work at home procedures for current employees. Consider preliminary efforts to improve the ability to quickly add staff in areas not affected by outbreaks so production can be moved.
To reference this response for validation purposes - we are in the travel business. We will be including country-specific measures and contingency plans (personal contacts, subsistence aid, callable resources) for all countries in which we have travelers, up to and including emergency extraction for employees and customers + pro-active and real-time monitoring of local and regional issues whilst either member of the aforementioned groups is traveling.
We have a Pandemic Influenza Plan, plus divisional plans which plans for smaller work groups that may be affected.
Developed pandemic-specific plan, in conjunction with Medical, Security, and Communications departments. Considered stockpile of meds. Identifying critical roles and processes.
When you boil it down it's actually a "severe lack of people available to work" scenario, which is mainly how it would be covered in the plans, but there is also a group considering the general pandemic risks/mitigations.
Which critical processes need to continue, can these continue from home? Installing broadband and providing laptops for people to work from home.
I am an independent BC/DR consultant and am currently implementing a major illness outbreak plan as part of a client’s overall BC plan. Measures included are:
•Date: 18th Nov 2005 •Region: World •Type:
Article •Topic: BC general |
