When it comes to protecting your business, hoping things don’t break while keeping your fingers crossed won’t cut it. There’s too much on the line, especially if you have a large team that relies on your success for their financial stability. These days, having a solid disaster preparedness plan is a necessity that can’t be sidestepped. Disasters of all sorts should be accounted for in such a plan—hurricanes, cyberattacks, building fires…the list goes on.
Creating a disaster recovery plan for small business establishments requires careful planning in order to succeed. You want to ensure business continuity while also protecting your team, assets, and customers. Let’s go over an effective strategy for making it all happen.
Assess Your Risks
If you don’t have an understanding of the threats you have to protect against, there’s no way to devise an effective disaster preparedness plan. Depending on your industry, geographic location, and infrastructure, the risk factors could be wildly different. Here’s what you can do:
- Identify Potential Threats: There are three main types of threats to prepare for.
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- Natural disasters like wildfires, hurricanes, and earthquakes
- Tech risks such as cyberattacks and IT failures
- Human threats, along the lines of theft, vandalism, and violence.
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- Conduct a Business Impact Analysis: This will help you determine the effects various sources of disaster will have on your business. How will they disrupt supply chains, customer service, revenue, and operations overall? Such an analysis will help you prioritize the things that need protection and how quickly services need to be restored.
Create a Disaster Preparedness Team
It’s time to assemble a team that will step up in the event that any of these disasters take place. Designate a group of trusted team members who will be responsible for devising and executing your disaster preparedness plan should the need arise.
Be sure to define the roles and responsibilities of each team member. There should be someone to oversee operations, logistics, HR, IT, and safety. Once this step is complete, it’s time to designate the critical function roles. Choose leaders who will be focused on response coordination, communication, evacuation, and recovery. Having a clear chain of command that organizes this team will help you ensure swift, effective actions are taken at every level in the event of a crisis.
Develop an Emergency Response Plan
It’s finally time to come up with the emergency response plan itself. These aspects are critical to minimizing damage and keeping everyone safe in the event of disaster:
- Evacuation Procedures: Evacuation routes, assembly areas, and role designations should be carefully planned and conveyed to all personnel and visitors. It’s a good idea to post printouts of these procedures in areas that see high foot traffic.
- Communication Strategies: Set up communication channels—internal and external—such as alert systems, emergency contact lists, and procedures for keeping employees, customers, and stakeholders informed.
- Safety Protocols: Shelter-in-place, first aid, hazardous material, and fire safety protocols should all receive careful thought.
Protect Critical Business Functions
One main goal of a disaster preparedness plan is the survival of the business itself. If your business goes under as the result of a crisis, the livelihoods of your employees will be put at risk. Here’s what you can do to preserve essential business functions:
- Identify Core Operations: What assets are vital to keep your business afloat? Consider departments, personnel, and other systems.
- Implement Data Backup and Cybersecurity Measures: You likely have plenty of digital assets, and not having backups puts you at serious risk. Cloud-based solutions, encrypted backups, and up-to-date cybersecurity best practices are all key.
- Plan for Alternative Work Arrangements: Ensure your team has remote work capabilities—or that you have a secondary job site set up—in the event of a disaster that puts your physical location out of commission.
Conduct Emergency Preparedness Training
You can have a rock-solid preparedness plan, but it won’t be effective if your staff isn’t trained to execute it. To make sure they are, conduct regular training and drills to test your plan in real time. This can be done through disaster simulations for cybersecurity breaches, evacuation, and severe weather events. To complement these drills, provide your team with handbooks and checklists that they can refer to whenever they need to.
Review and Update Regularly
Threats can always change for a variety of reasons, and you should be aware of these changes so you can adapt your disaster preparedness plan accordingly. To make sure you stay on top of it:
- Reevaluate on a yearly basis to make sure your plan still covers all the relevant bases. In addition, you should reassess following major operational changes, as well as updates to your workforce and infrastructure.
- Stay abreast of upcoming threats and regulations. When you’re informed about emerging threats, updated industry standards, and new technology that will affect your business, you can stay ahead of any disaster coming your way.
We’ll Devise the Perfect Emergency Preparedness Plan
It’s tough to know when a disaster will strike your business, but being ready for it at all times is within reach. By assessing risks, forming a team, creating a response plan, and conducting emergency preparedness training, you’ll be ready to respond to any crisis and minimize the damage it causes.
If you don’t have a plan in place already, the best time to change that is right now. Reach out to GEM Technology and we’ll help you with a personalized response plan that will keep your business and your people protected.