Guide to business continuity and pandemic planning
Business continuity and pandemic plans
The last pandemic that threatened businesses in this way was H1N1, or swine flu, which happened a decade ago. Ideally, businesses have been keeping their pandemic plans up to date, testing for business continuity problems. Much has changed since then in terms of how businesses operate, including the rise of remote working, the increased use of software as a service and other cloud-based applications, and just-in-time manufacturing and lean production strategies in supply chains. Also, businesses today are more global in terms of workers, customers, vendors, partners and suppliers, making business continuity and pandemic plans far more complex to test and carry out.
So where should organizations start as they try to deal with the impact of COVID-19 or prepare for the next pandemic? Organizations should create and execute on a workplace pandemic preparedness plan along with business continuity plans. To familiarize employees and emergency teams with the plan, businesses should conduct exercises annually, if not more frequently. Use this pandemic recovery plan template to get started.
A pandemic impact analysis is critical to understanding how to help your company prepare for and recover from COVID-19 and other such disasters. By filling out this template, business leaders will learn the critical roles, procedures and assets that must be considered as a pandemic unfolds. Getting back to business as usual is going to take a lot of time and patience. The resumption of normal activities will depend on how well you execute your pandemic recovery plan.
Because organizations are so dependent on providers across all aspects of their business, they should well understand and have tested providers’ pandemic plans. For instance, if the provider’s own workforce is affected, it’s important to know how the provider will maintain high availability of its application or respond to service issues. In many companies, line of business managers are the conduits to service providers; therefore, they must be coached on how to include them in pandemic plans. It’s also important for organizations to centralize service-provider relationship information in case the managers themselves are unavailable.
One of the most important elements of pandemic planning, especially when assuming a high absenteeism rate, is to understand how employee skills complement one another. Conducting a skills inventory will let you know which employees could back up others if they are affected Learn more about business continuity planning.