The Virtual Edge: Disaster recovery and business continuity (Part 2 of 5)

Posted by: Matt Rivera

In the first installment of The Virtual Edge, Geoffrey Dubiski opened the discussion by reviewing sick time/absenteeism as a first option to having employees work remotely or from home. In this installment, he’s going to review the reasons why you should have a virtual or remote operational plan as part of a business continuity and recovery plan. ~ Mike Zambon

Virtual or remote operational plans are extremely important for the long-term welfare of an organization. They also are another way to test the traditional thought and policies of where work is performed.

Ask yourself: What if your organization was in New Orleans when Katrina hit, or downtown Manhattan in September 2001, or in Haiti during the earthquakes? What if you had employees there? What if one or all of your facilities were damaged by fire or some other catastrophic event? What if you were unable to access your facilities for a short- or long-term period for any reason? Most firms have a disaster recovery plan for their data, but can you afford to close your doors or idle your workforce?

Business continuity and recovery plans (BCRP) are a key component to organizations of any size to execute tasks and keep essential operations running. They are ideal to ensure the safety of your workforce, data, and revenue. They do not need to be extensive efforts, but must be exhaustive in planning and practice.

Why the need for a BCRP? For one, it highlights vulnerabilities for the safety of your operations and workforce. It delineates essential staff for continued operational effectiveness and success. And lastly, it requires you to set up temporary or off-site operations as a contingency plan — if only for your data — as well as a plan to instruct employees where (if at all) to report with other pertinent information.

A BCRP is more than rally points for evacuation of the premises, or where to call when weather (flooding) or damage (fire) happens. It is a blueprint to ensure the health and welfare of your workforce and your organization.

During the first few days of recovery after Hurricane Katrina, in the midst of the mayhem, there were shining examples of efforts by individuals, organizations, and companies that demonstrated resilience and creativity. Even companies with a BCRP found that it was never meant to cover such a catastrophe or was never practiced to ensure its implementation would be effective.

In a key message from Frank Glaviano, VP for Shell (one of New Orleans’s largest employers), about the company’s commitment to remain in New Orleans and regain operations, he stated, “You can’t fix the business until you fix the people.”

During our Sumner Grace Study, our year-long investigation of post-Katrina New Orleans, we discovered many ideas and lessons learned. We conducted it in conjunction with the Human Resource Management Association, which is the local Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) chapter, and dozens of individual businesses of various sizes.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the study:

Vary your communication channels and provide redundancy. You have to have more than a call-in line or Web site to combat mass power outages and over-utilized phone systems. Add these items to your disaster response strategy:

• Text messaging. Do you have your employees’ cell or PIN numbers? This technology needs only micro-seconds to send, and is effective when cell towers are overloaded.
• Call trees. Have key personnel responsible for contacting a portion of your workforce to consolidate lines of communication and coordinate “who has seen who and where” as part of the process.
• An additional emergency contact OUTSIDE the metro/local geography of the facility. Update this additional contact at annual review. This is for when an event is so widespread that even local emergency contacts are affected.

Have staff or vendors for immediate response as part of your plan. Ensure that you understand essential personnel for your plan’s execution and follow-up. Create contingencies for minimal equipment, space and vital services that you will need, and integrate your vendors into that plan.

Upgrade the plan regularly and store in multiple locations as well as off-site. It is highly ineffective to complete your plan and place it on a shelf. Worse would be to store it electronically on the computer system within your facility only. As we have learned from these events, you will not be able to access those systems. Instead, utilize off-site storage or system backups that are accessible to a number of essential personnel, and have multiple hard copies available to key leads listed within the plan, as well as at other facilities if you have them.

Practice the plan. After developing the plan, this is the most important task. Practice helps you ensure that current and new employees assimilate to the plan. It also lets you stress test the plan to find caps and take corrective measures, create a higher level of acceptance, and increase the level of execution and potential for success.

Once you have created and practiced your plan, it is important to consider essential personnel, and to pilot short-term operations to keep customers happy and revenue coming in. In other words, where and how do your employees work?

Create two categories: those employees who require direct contact with customers, and hence, need some type of interim facility, and those who can operate remotely. You will find, when forced, that many of the typical obstacles of allowing virtual or remote employment become less of a factual issue and more of an excuse.

In our study, post-Katrina companies were effective in retaining most of their workforce and resuming operations through these methods:

• Seventy-eight percent of organizations had to offer flex schedules.
• Fourteen percent added commuter reimbursement accounts.
• Fourteen percent opened a branch or satellite office.
• Eight percent offered company transportation.
• Eight percent began virtual operations.
• Six percent sponsored an employee ride share program.

In addition, companies had to understand how to retain and regain their workforce once facilities or virtual operations were available. We found that 94 percent of firms kept payroll and benefits in force for an average of eight weeks. Only 65 percent of firms had this as a standard policy. As a result, 80 percent of firms had +60 percent return rate, and 70 percent of firms retained +60 percent of their pre-Katrina staff.

Now, how do you gain a virtual edge? Truly assess what roles are required to be within the four walls of your company (or company’s multiple facilities). This will allow you to create a decision matrix that aligns talent acquisition and retention with the costs and risks of virtual/remote engagements. It will also provide options for extending your geographic engagement with talent (and even customers). Plus, you’ll be able to retain talent and create a competitive advantage.

We all know that core talent (seven to 15 years experience) is the new sandwich generation. With homes, kids in school, boards, local activities, and planning for their aging parents, there is a lot of valuable talent that will not or cannot relocate. Add to that current economic issues of upside-down mortgages, and you might not get to increase offer-acceptance unless you can allow for remote or virtual employment.

Put yourself to the test. While you have to screen for people that can operate in such an environment (some people don’t work well without the direct interaction of peers and customers), you might be able to leverage, in good times and bad, the acquisition and retention of truly great talent.

In our next two installments, we will further these ideas to show how virtual and remote engagements lower costs, increase employee satisfaction, create a truly green initiative, and expand your reach. This will culminate in our debate over hurdles to adopting and implementing such policies and practices.