EMERGENCIES IN THE WORKPLACE
STEPS TO CRITICAL EVENT SUCCESS
Many organisations are being asked to respond more quickly and more decisively to critical events, but with far fewer resources. Javier Colado, Senior Vice President, International Sales at Everbridge has devised a nine-point approach to dealing with such situations effectively.
In an environment of disjointed processes and information, there is often too much data being grappled with to effectively arrive at a basic understanding about a critical event. By adopting a proven, nine-step approach, organisations can improve their response to critical events.
PLAN EFFICIENTLY A critical event management (CEM) plan must be comprehensive enough to be effective. You should appropriately categorise critical events by type, predictability, cause and scope, while differentiating between routine emergencies and crisis events. This will, in turn, help determine how the organisation will deal with each event and whole will take the lead.
BUILD PARTNERSHIPS WITH LEADERSHIP More companies are changing their organisational structure to enable a consolidated approach. The ideal is to build a fusion centre – a collaborative effort of two or more agencies that provide resources, expertise, and/or information to the centre with the goal of maximising the ability to detect, prevent, apprehend, and respond to critical events.
If that’s not possible, build alliances between the chief security officer, chief information security officer and chief information officer.
ASSESS YOUR RISKS AND SOURCES OF
INFORMATION The goal is to confirm the threat event and ensure the appropriate team has all the necessary input and contextual feeds in one place to make the appropriate decisions. That means lining up trusted information sources and all risks.
Understand the five key assets: people, buildings, IT systems, supply chain, and brand/reputation. Assign a value to these assets to better determine risk.
IDENTIFY CRITICAL ASSETS AND FUNCTIONS It’s essential to know where employees, travellers, visitors, offices, manufacturing facilities and other critical assets are located. It’s also critical to know how they are interconnected and the dependencies between them. Ideally, organisations can visualise this at a glance.
twitter.com/TomorrowsHS
QUANTIFY AND PRIORITISE YOUR RISK Figure out what is critical and what isn’t. What is the impact, what is the exposure?
Quantify risk based on the threat; the nature of the threat; the organisation’s overall vulnerability or exposure and the overall impact. Context matters, and risk will change based on that.
IDENTIFY AND LOCATE ALL STAKEHOLDERS Quickly locating, communicating with and assisting employees in a crisis is a priority. To that end, typically in any type of critical event, organisations will deal with people who can do something about the event and those impacted by the event.
VISUALISE WITH A COMMON OPERATING
PICTURE Everyone should share and operate from the same set of information about the situation. It’s also important that people are viewing the right information to make the right decisions.
Know when to engage the appropriate levels of people and the appropriate functions and launch the appropriate protocols when necessary. You must be prepared to deal with more groups and workflows for more complex situations.
AUTOMATE WORKFLOWS Automate processes to prevent errors in workflows and handle responses more quickly. By feeding minimal information based on an assessment of the situation into a CEM system, response times are enhanced to a huge extent. Some take it a step further by adding elements like checklists.
ANALYSE PERFORMANCE The final step is to close the loop by analysing how well the organisation responded. By classifying and tracking all assets in a centralised, visual and correlative way, it’s possible to assess each event’s impact and the response to it.
Businesses are expected to not only know where their employees are always, but to quickly and easily gather information about critical events to anticipate the business and life safety impact.
www.everbridge.com
47
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60
