Lynne
Miller explains how to develop and manage an awareness raising
programme.
How's the business continuity/disaster recovery
awareness program at your organisation? Sure, you know
it's important. You watch information on the annual Business Continuity
Awareness Week come and go. But what are you actually doing? Do
you know how to get started? Well, let's start with some basics.
Importance of an awareness programme
An awareness programme is an important element of any
ongoing, proactive approach to business continuity planning and
implementation, disaster preparedness and recovery, as well as
crisis management.
Purpose of an awareness programme
On a fundamental level,
the purpose of an awareness programme is to raise the level of
awareness of an employee's role before, during and after an event.
It is important to emphasise preparation, mitigation and personal safety. By making employees
more aware and involving them, you are making employees "lifeguards"
of business functions and company assets, as well as their own
assets. But that's not all. An awareness programme can also be
used to establish a baseline of your organisation's awareness
against which to measure the effectiveness of awareness efforts
and to garner ongoing management support. We all know that
unless we have ongoing management support and commitment, all
our best efforts seem to fade away with time.
Benefits
of an awareness programme
- Awareness of the importance for a company-wide
business continuity / disaster recovery programme;
- Awareness of company commitment to business
continuity planning and disaster recovery;
- Appreciation and understanding of what
could happen to a business during an event;
- Awareness and knowledge of procedures
to mitigate impacts of events;
- Awareness of emergency response procedures;
- Awareness of employee roles and responsibilities
- both professional and personal.
Critical
success factors of a good awareness programme
- Provide relevant examples of events that
could affect your organization and tailor those to your audience
needs;
- Communicate the value of an on-going business
continuity planning / disaster recovery programme;
- Create a baseline so you can measure the
effectiveness of your awareness efforts;
- Acquire and maintain executive support;
- Create reusable materials and keep them
up-to-date.
Getting started
So now that you know a few basics, how do you get started?
You might consider creating a survey to gauge the current level
of awareness across your organisation and create a baseline. Questions
should be relevant to your organisation and could include:
- Do you have a workaround for a computer
outage?
- Do you have a workaround when the facility
is unavailable?
- Do you know if there are business continuity
or disaster recovery plans?
- Do you know what to do during an emergency?
When you send your survey out, be sure to
take a good sampling of your organisation that includes senior
management, middle and line management and members of the general
employee population. Information received from the survey will
provide a good baseline and will help you determine where the
gaps are in communicating important information about your business
continuity planning / disaster recovery programme.
After determining what your gaps are, you
are ready to begin creating objectives to address the gaps. But
first remember to identify your audience and know their needs:
What is the composition of the audience? What are their expectations?
Are there political hurdles to overcome? Is there any resistance
to overcome? These questions need to be answered before you can
define a strategy for effectively communicating to your audience.
The communication strategy should include the best media for communicating
to each audience, as well as the key messages you want to send,
and what you want them to understand.
Develop a strategy
Next, develop a campaign strategy: Who will run the
campaign? How long will it run? Will you use one or multiple media?
Who will you transition the materials to? Will this be a one-time
or recurring campaign? A campaign strategy should include:
- Basic information such as why the programme
is being developed (if this is a first for your organisation),
the importance of business continuity planning and disaster
recovery, and definitions of key terms so everyone in the organisation
is speaking the same language.
- Organisational information that includes
who in your organisation is involved in business continuity
planning / disaster recovery activities, what your organisation
is doing to protect itself from various events, and your organisation's
emergency response procedures.
- Employee information including how an
event may affect employees, what to do before/during/after an
event, who to contact, where to go, how to deal with the media.
- Information on external entities such
as information about the Red Cross, Federal Emergency Management
Association, local emergency management offices and local fire/police.
Communication plan / materials
Now you are ready to develop your communication plan
and materials. As you are developing your communication plan,
consider how you could incorporate the materials into your organisation's
existing processes. A couple of common areas include new employee
orientations and other awareness programmes (safety, security).
Another good place to incorporate these materials is in your project
methodology. This will help ensure that all projects consider
how to protect what they are implementing. Also, you can make
it a normal part of employees' jobs by encouraging managers to
include a discussion on business continuity / disaster recovery
in staff meetings from time to time. This can be further encouraged
by making this an expectation and part of manager's (and maybe
even the employee's) performance review.
All the materials you create during your
campaign should be reusable with updates being made as necessary
to keep pace with the dynamics of your organisation. In order
to keep the materials up-to-date, you should define maintenance
triggers so the materials are reviewed and updated on a regular
basis. These triggers could be just prior to tornado or hurricane
season, right after you conduct exercises, quarterly, etc. The
timing will depend on your organisation's needs.
Tools
So how do you organise all this? You can create some
reusable spreadsheets to help you manage your campaign:
Communication plan (to plan your campaign and capture
maintenance triggers)
| Timing |
Audience |
Key
messages |
Media |
Responsible |
| 04/04/04 |
Senior
Mgmt |
·
Explain campaign
·
Discuss costs, benefits & goals
·
Ask for commitment |
Meeting |
BCP/DR
Manager |
| 3 months
prior to tornado season |
General
Employee Population |
·
What to do
·
Where to go
·
Who to contact
·
Emphasise safety |
E-mail
Intranet |
BCP/DR
Staff |
| Annually |
Sampling
of all employees |
·
Send survey to determine level of current understanding |
Intranet |
BCP/DR
Manager |
Key message spreadsheet (to guide you in creating your messages)
| Hook
What
will capture your audience's attention? |
Message/question
What
message do you want to convey? |
More
information
Where can someone go for
more information?
|
| Headlines
that announce business closings due to not having a continuity
plan (50 percent never reopen, 90 percent fail within one
year after a severe loss etc). |
Understand
the importance of business continuity planning and having
a current and tested business continuity plan. |
Refer
to department Intranet site. |
| Pictorial
image of a business about to have a disaster or major disruption. |
Are you
prepared to continue doing business when the next disaster
comes? |
Refer
to January newsletter or department Intranet site. |
Media selection framework (for determining the best media for
your communications)
| Media |
Best
application |
Worst
application |
| Printed
materials |
In-depth
information; information that includes charts, tables; reinforcing
key messages. |
If used
only to communicate time-sensitive information. |
| E-Mail |
When the
communication needs to go out quickly; short communications
that are easy to read, FYI's. |
In-depth
information; information that includes charts, tables. |
| Meetings |
Communicating
messages that are complex and you need to allow for two-way
discussion; confidential information. |
If the
information will be extremely time-consuming that could
be better explored at your own pace. |
| Intranet |
Communications
that allow for browsing at your own pace. |
If used
to replace face-to-face communications. |
Finally, you need to have fun. Try creating
posters or even holding a contest to enhance awareness in your
organisation. Open houses, facility tours, demonstrations, or
lunch and learn sessions allow employees to come and go as their
schedules allow. Make sure to give each employee a "take-away"
i.e., pamphlet or laminated card with important information.
If you are just beginning, the information
in this article should prove helpful in getting you started. And
if your organisation has a solid business continuity / disaster
recovery programme in place, you might want to take an opportunity
to showcase what you have in place or demonstrate the need for
enhancing your current programme.
Lynne Miller,
CBCP, CBM is a consultant with Keane, Inc.
1721 E. Hamilton Bloomington, IL 61704 L9MILLER@msn.com 309-838-7601
