Building a Resilient Workforce

With the rise in scenarios that affect the safety of employees and the flow of business operations, companies and organizations face an important question: How can you build resilient businesses and teams?

Natural disasters, active assailants and mental health crises are becoming more and more common and will, unfortunately, affect your corporation at some point. The key now is to create a business emergency response plan that is adequate and comprehensive enough to keep its employees safe before, during and after emergencies. To do so, organizations like yours must focus on planning, testing, and education. 

One of the best ways to increase resilience within an organization is to create a clear communication and response plan. The best plans help employees understand what to do in a variety of scenarios — from cyber-attacks and power outages to severe weather, active assailants, mental health crises, lapses in technology or pandemics. 

Business resilience means adapting to change and navigating disruptions, whether emergencies or non-emergencies. With better emergency planning and clear communication channels, leaders and employees can maintain business standards while keeping operations running smoothly. 

Emergency managers foster resiliency

To face challenges successfully — and to prioritize the safety and wellbeing of employees — organizations must have the proper emergency management processes in place. This includes systems that allow key stakeholders to make split-second decisions to protect employees and support business continuity.

Regardless of action plans, a resilient business would lay the groundwork of preparation to the best of its abilities while equipping its teams to handle anything that comes their way. Emergencies can be unpredictable, so their action plans must be adaptable.

To foster a resilient environment, typically, a business will elect an emergency management coordinator or work with a public information officer to create and prepare action plans and procedures for responding to emergencies. They are in charge of leading responses during and after emergencies while also working closely with safety personnel, elected officials and government agencies. 

An emergency manager is responsible for delegating tasks and prioritizing actions. Therefore, having a firm grasp on procedures and working out communication plans with other employees, administrators and leadership are essential. 

Using technology to improve responses times

Gone are the days of stacks of three-ring binders and the need to sift through paperwork to find plans and important information. This outdated process wastes precious time and makes it more difficult for emergency management coordinators to communicate what is happening to employees and emergency responders. 

A resilient business in today’s world should have a comprehensive communication platform that is accessible in various forms. Your continuity plan should also extend into the aftermath of emergencies, helping leaders and employees navigate challenges left in their wake.

Without an effective mass communication platform, it is difficult for businesses to navigate a world of unknowns, especially as severe weather events, natural disasters, mental health issues and other emergencies continue to rise. 

How to be flexible while staying organized

Even with careful planning, emergencies are, by their very nature, unpredictable. Having flexibility in response methods — and properly training leaders, stakeholders, and employees on how to make split-second decisions — allows everyone to choose the safest next steps. 

Traditional modes of emergency communication — intercoms, public address systems, email, social media, and instant messaging — may not work for today’s mobile workforce. What’s more, communications systems that only rely on one or two methods of communication will experience a gap in resilience. It is easy for employees to miss alerts when communication is limited. 

Why are these individual modes of notification problematic? Employees who have silenced notifications on their desktop and mobile devices, or are not active on social media, may also miss electronic alerts. Plus, when severe weather strikes, it is not uncommon for server and network outages to occur, cutting off company operations and emails. Phone trees are also unreliable in the event of an outage or cyber-attack. 

A multi-modal communications tool, on the other hand, would ensure that employees everywhere are alerted on time and that they never miss a notification. 

Keep your employees in the loop

For emergency and non-emergency action plans to be successful, employees should not only be aware that they exist, but trained thoroughly to use them. Without this crucial information and training, employees won’t know how to protect themselves and others during critical situations, which reduces resiliency in the face of challenges. 

Building a resilient workforce involves more than annual one-hour training. It involves:

• Surveying employees on-site and remotely about safety concerns
• Analyzing survey results with emergency managers, HR personnel, and other key stakeholders
• Conducting meetings and Q&A sessions to discuss business resilience efforts
• Training employees and leadership for evacuations, lockdown procedures and fires
• Providing an in-depth understanding of communication expectations during emergencies
• Testing employees with drills and mock scenarios
• Updating employees when updates are made to the emergency response plan

The biggest takeaway? A resilient workforce is one that understands emergency plans and knows how to use emergency communication channels. A resilient organization is one that knows how to leverage critical communication platforms to enable multi-modal alerts, two-way communications and more.

Rave Mobile Safety helps businesses build resiliency through communication and collaboration

Rave Mobile Safety provides critical communication and collaboration platforms to coordinate incident responses. With pre-set templates, tasks lists and multiple communication methods, businesses can equip their workforce with better safety measures in the workplace. 

A critical communication and collaboration platform like Rave Mobile Safety can minimize operational disruption before, during, and after events, ensuring each employee is informed, actionable and safe, whether working in an office or remotely. What’s more, this system can easily connect employees to emergency management coordinators and first responders, further decreasing reaction times and situational awareness.

Rave Mobile Safety can also help emergency management coordinators and leadership instantly deliver the right messages to the right people through geo–polling and targeted messaging by location. This helps minimize panic for those who are unaffected and increases situational awareness for those in the direct line of impact. 

Our system equips employers, emergency response teams, and key stakeholders to navigate planned events, crisis scenarios and critical non-emergency events by boosting emergency preparedness and response. Through timely and targeted communication, employees can be connected to the proper safety procedures in seconds.

With the right tools and the right support, your workforce will feel better prepared and more protected, allowing them to do their best work with less concern about unknowns. To learn more about how a critical communication and collaboration platform can build resiliency for your organization, visit: https://www.ravemobilesafety.com/critical-communication-collaboration-solutions/.