Emergency Planning with Technology: Take Action When Crisis Hits

Time to Act

With COVID-19 spreading quickly, many companies will start to engage their emergency management plans. These policies are used when there is a tornado, hurricane, earthquake or whatever else may be considered an event that causes us to keep operations going while being away from the office.

Establish a list of items that need to be in place to cover extended time away. Things to include and consider for emergency plans are:

  • Developing your plan of action.
  • Knowing your trusted sources of information like government announcements and state of emergencies that could initiate this plan into action.
  • Communicating with your clientele that your local office will be physically closing, what will continue to be worked on and how to continue to communicate with staff.

Document and File Sharing

How do you continue to exchange documents? Can you currently access your files for work while away from the office? Most will say yes, however, if you aren’t able to do this yet, you should get something in place.

The most inexpensive way is to create a remote method to access the files via Remote Desktop or a VPN, which connects remote devices as if you are locally connected in the office. More elaborate ways allow the movement of data to the cloud and allowing access to it through that method. Once internal document sharing is in place, establish a secure means of file transfers for clients to get information to you. Many, many cloud storage options give you the benefit to request and send files securely. Contaminated documents or snail-mailing to insecure areas can cause more problems than the money spent on a secure file sharing service.

Internet connections for staff and team members at their homes might cause issues with file sharing. Connectivity should be in the plan to determine whose internet will allow for the continuation of operations and who might not be able to keep working, as well as the actions to take with each scenario.

Meet with Clients and Colleagues

If you are unable to meet in person with clients and colleagues during this time, you can utilize teleconferencing with standard phone calls. To replicate face-to-face interaction, try Skype or Zoom Free, which uses the webcam on your laptop or smartphone to recreate that in-person meeting. For some, this may be more productive, because you can share your screen to discuss documents and other types of information. On top of that, clients or colleagues will be able to share from their end too. At the Society, we also use Microsoft Teams to conduct group video chats to keep everyone in the loop on projects and updates.

What also helps in this situation is calling from your office phone number wherever you are. Most VOIP based phone services can run on apps that use your same phone number from work on a smartphone or your computer, and some services even allow you to take a physical phone from the office home for use. Establish the expectation for these services to be used in these situations and do training sessions annually to ensure the information stays fresh.

Setting up a structure for communication dissemination to office closures and openings is crucial to having plans execute correctly. Email is usually the number one method, but other options include posting it on company sites such as SharePoint, work community pages such as Teams or Slack and even text messaging. Adding a similar public-facing message to your website or signature to your emails ensures the information doesn’t warp by word of mouth and helps keep the messaging clear. Perhaps even turn it into a Frequently Asked Questions page.

Sustaining The Environment

After the rollout of a plan, with business continuing, how do we maintain this to maintain high productivity? Using the tools listed above, hold weekly update meetings via Zoom or Teams in the form of group video calls to keep colleagues in the loop and what will be the next steps. Use your chats and group posts in Teams/Slack or the online work collaboration software you have chosen for immediate communications in between the more elaborate group video calls.

If someone on the team is unable to continue working, who takes over their work, and what are their next communication steps are a few of the questions to answer in extended virtual office situations. It is easy in regular day environments to notice that an employee hasn’t come in; with virtual environments, you only have their login times to double-check this.

While working through an emergency and virtual work situation, communication needs to be a priority.