Human factors in business continuity, part two
Resiliency is the ability to avoid, minimize, withstand, and recover from the effects of adversity, whether natural, manmade, under all circumstances of use. Resiliency applied to the nation’s critical infrastructure is trustworthiness under stress and spans high availability, continuous operations, and disaster recovery. However, for these operations to be resilient under stress, more than a loosely coupled arrangement is needed. They must be holistically specified, architected, designed, implemented, and tested if they are to operate with resilience under stress. Source: wikipedia Resilience (resilience engineering)
Many organisations have tried and tested plans for IT continuity and other key aspects of the business in place. However in our experience, very few have clearly thought through how they might go about supporting the recovery and well-being of staff affected by an incident. Yet people are at the core of most businesses in terms of operations, knowledge and functions, which means that the core of the business is impacted and potentially destabilised by critical or acutely stressful incidents. This definitely affects business continuity. The common response at present is to assume that staff will be assisted back to work by a counselling agency, often out-sourced and with no real knowledge of specific organisations procedures and expectations. Furthermore there is an assumption that all counselling services have a specialist knowledge of trauma recovery. Our work has shown us, that when crises do happen, although trauma counselling can be very helpful for some individuals, it is the response of colleagues and managers coupled with support from friends and family, that proves to be of most assistance. Building this aspect into the organisation through appropriate training and preparation can be of enormous benefit to building a resilient community which then has the ‘ability to spring back into shape after being bent or stretched’ by circumstances. Useful points to consider in proactive planning • Knowledge of traumatic stress physiology is vital! When the physiology and brain response to trauma is properly understood, managers can then start to design and train people in procedures that become automatic under stress. People generally do not learn new behaviour in a crisis. • Normalisation of common symptoms and responses following a trauma go a long way to reassuring and calming people. • Anger is a natural part of a trauma response. People look for someone to blame and angry responses are easily triggered. Perceived lack of support or thoughtless responses are remembered for a long time. • Feelings of loss of control accompany trauma response. Giving people some control over planning their recovery can make a real difference. • By including the human factors response in test scenarios, organisations can identify common responses in teams and individuals and understand how they may affect vital communication in a crisis. Case study one We worked with the in-house HR team to create a training programme that taught participants the physiology of trauma and symptoms, skills on offering appropriate support, conducting difficult conversations and delivering bad news, using case studies for discussion on procedures. This course was attended initially by senior managers and cascaded down to all line managers. During the course, managers realized that they had supplied safety recorders to their frontline staff who were instructed to activate these in dangerous situations. However, the staff were not using them. When managers understood the brain’s fight/flight response to trauma, they were able to identify that no procedural training had been given on using the safety device and therefore the response had not become automatic. The training forum was the catalyst that enabled them to think of ways to remedy this. They also identified a question on their procedural ‘Assault Form’ that consistently provoked angry responses from staff. By rewording the question from ‘was there anything different you could have done?’ to ‘is there anything that we could learn from this incident?’ it became more supportive and less of a trigger for traumatic anger. Case study two A training programme was then delivered which included Human Resources, Business Continuity and Communications personnel working alongside the staff supporter volunteers. This training included, physiology of trauma, delivering emotional first aid, building resilience, trauma risk assessment, communication and listening skills. We also included scenarios and training on telephone communication skills, which would be more likely utilized in a pandemic situation. A scenario was then initiated which included input from the communication teams identified in the business continuity plans. From their reactions to a relatively simple scenario, individuals realized how powerful the impact of a real-life critical incident might be and were able to identify their response to trauma and discuss how they might function and communicate effectively and teams were able to identify and rectify weak areas in communication. Pro-active training Checklist of requirements for the proactive phase: - Managers educated in trauma and communication. Be prepared ‘Prepare 80 percent of your plan - that way the 20 percent unknown can be worked on without being overwhelming’ Mical de Boer Authors: As a psychotherapist and occupational therapist, Siobhán McGee and Emerald-jane Turner, share over 30 years experience working with people and have brought their knowledge of the physiological understanding of trauma into many business sectors and organisational settings including working with financial institutions, fire services personnel and providing support and guidance following 7th July bombings. Siobhán and Emerald-jane work for Human Resilience Ltd. The focus of Human Resilience is to help organisations understand the processes of traumatic stress and create a number of in-house strategies for providing support and emotional first aid to their staff in order to ensure a supportive recovery environment and therefore reduce the need for longer term support such as counselling. © Copyright all rights reserved Human Resilience 2008 Read the first article in the series
•Date: 22nd February 2008• Region:UK/World•Type: Article •Topic: BC general |
