The Business Continuity Institute has released the latest edition of its Emergency Communications Report, which provides a snapshot of how organizations are using emergency communications capabilities within their business continuity processes.
The report, which is based on over 600 responses to a recent worldwide survey, is sponsored by F24.
Key findings include:
- 59 percent of organizations utilize a crisis management / emergency notification tool or software. This is higher than in last year’s report where this figure was 49 percent.
- Communicating with staff (77 percent) is seen as the greatest challenge during crisis management. This is followed by gathering, validating, and sharing accurate information (69 percent), and locating staff (45 percent).
- One key element in emergency communication plans is the response time of activating the plans. This year’s report shows slower response time as only 22 percent of the organizations take less than five minutes to activate their plans, which is lower than in last year’s report (28 percent). In addition, there are more organizations (16 percent) that take more than an hour to do so than last year (12 percent). Extra efforts on reviewing, training, and exercising the existing plans are encouraged to shorten the response time.
- 67 percent of organizations take an hour or less in providing initial information on a crisis to top management, while 1 out of 10 organizations (10 percent) take more than 2 hours to do so.
- Failure of emergency communications is mostly caused by lack of accurate staff contact information (49 percent), lack of understanding from recipients (42 percent), failure of manual processes (33 percent), unavailability of mobile network (28 percent) and poor implementation (24 percent).
- Five out of ten organizations have regular scheduled training programmes for emergency communications plans.
- Respondents exercise their plans at least once a year; this shows a 5 percent increase from last year (42 percent to 47 percent).
- 71 percent of organizations activated their emergency communications plans at least once in the last twelve months.
- Adverse weather (62 percent) is the number one trigger of emergency communications plans; cyber security incidents or data breach (34 percent) ranked second.
Read the report (registration required).
