Still no pandemic plan? Act now...

Helpful tips for developing a pandemic plan and for checking that your current plan has no gaps. By Andrew Fernandes.

Exactly how the current influenza pandemic will develop is uncertain, but it is expected that the Autumn / Fall period will see a resurgence in outbreaks and consequent disruptions to business activities. There is still a window to plan for this, but if your organization doesn’t have a pandemic plan yet, the time to act is now!

Let’s start with the tangible impact – PEOPLE.

Can any organization continue its business without people? – Whether it is doing customer service, technical support, production, and engineering, there is the one common factor required – people to do the job. Automation can improve the process, but cannot replace people (not as yet anyway!)

So with this most compelling risk staring at you in the face, what are some of the things that one needs to look at from a people perspective?

* WITFM – What’s in it for me! If your employee falls sick and/or is quarantined, is the employee going to be penalized?

* Medical – Most countries and public health care systems will be creaking with the strain imposed on them.

* Health and safety in the workplace – Yes, the rules will vary from country to country and even though some countries will shut work sites down, there will be countries that will not push that button. So there is an obligation to have this taken care of.

* Self ownership for health and safety – Extending to your employees, the opportunity to have a healthy home environment. This will translate to a healthy work environment

* Leverage business partners, industry practices - As you plan, look for best practices in the work place, Conduct round tables. Become think tanks of information and knowledge.

Things to work on now:

1. Pandemic payroll policy - get management consensus on what needs to be done in the event of extensive employee abseentism, which may last for a period of 7-21 days for each person.

2. Compensation and benefit policy – You will need to review this based on work force, size of your organization and diversification of your organization. The bigger, the more global, the more the variation in laws by country. The key to your success is defining a baseline and working on the nuances one country at a time.

3. Janitorial support – look at your janitorial support. If you have single source providers, this is a good time to build a list of alternate ones. If you have a quarantine, more than likely, your janitorial staff will be quarantined as well and the company itself will be impacted.

4. Sanitation requirements – Do you need to get masks and procure sanitizers for the work place? Remember these commodities typically have a shelf life of 5-7 years so the investment pays for itself. Again the caveat is: you will not get the equipment when you need it!

Quarantine quirks:

5. Labor/labour work force – for those that have production facilities and provide accommodation to the labor force, remember if they are quarantined, you will have to provide everything for them, right from catering services to housekeeping to extra janitorial and sanitation needs.

6. Business impact – If there is a quarantine, you will have no impact to your ‘bricks and mortar’ but of course you will have no people to run your production to deliver your services. Your service levels will plummet in less than 24 hours of a quarantine announcement.

7. Business redirection – Whether you are a call center or manufacturing, this will be the true acid test. You will have to redirect your business and ramp up virtually from 0 percent to 100 percent for perhaps the next 21 days. Depending on the severity of the impact, you may then be in a recovery mode or in a worst case scenario; you could still be in a free fall.

8. People impact – the X factor. Nobody wants to think about it. But you could suffer loss of employees. You will need to ensure that as part of your pre-planning you have reached out to Employee Assistance Programs for outreach services that can be utilized ‘on demand’. Remember at these times, services are a premium and if you have no contractual commitment you will not get them.

9. Management impact – People impact is not partial. You need to have succession planning as part of your crisis management efforts. Your management team is also human and therefore is prone to infection and, in the very worst case, death.

10. Network now – form round tables, engage people within your industry, share best practices. Reach out to your local health services, hospitals, CDC. Establish key contacts. These will be invaluable and life saving.

Author: Andrew Fernandes is a certified business continuity practitioner with 10+ year’s hands-on experience in business continuity and process improvements. He has been employed with Dell Inc, USA since 2005 driving global business continuity and crisis management efforts as the Global Manager- BCRP PMO Office. Andrew_Fernandes@Dell.com

•Date: 28th August 2009• Region: World •Type: Article •Topic: Pandemic planning
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