Yesterday, April 30, 2014, was the first National Day of Action – America’s PrepareAthon! sponsored by FEMA. 

Did you notice?  Did you care? 

I’m not asking to be rude.  I actually want to take this opportunity to address a major issue within my profession and get your thoughts and help.  But first, let me give you a bit of background on the event.  You can check out FEMA’s link here for more information:   http://www.community.fema.gov/connect.ti/AmericasPrepareathon. 

According to the FEMA website “America’s PrepareAthon! is a nationwide, community-based campaign for action to increase emergency preparedness and resilience through hazard-specific drills, group discussions and exercises conducted at the national level every fall and spring.”  I registered for the event and although I didn’t conduct any training or exercises yesterday I did pass on a few tweets and other information to contacts and reviewed some items for my family emergency kit.  According to the website there were 5,091,940 registered participants; with more than 317 million people in the US that comes out to about 1%.  Not a good participation rate in my opinion.  So I will go back to my initial questions – did you know and do you care? 

Is your company passionate about preparedness, logical about continuity, or are you walking around thinking everything is great, oblivious to potential doom right around the corner? 

Last week I published 5 information papers for global Business Continuity Awareness Week that addressed key thoughts regarding business preparedness. 

• What is business continuity and the reason you need to do it

• What is the cost of being unprepared

• What are the laws and standards you need to be aware of

• What are the benefits of a business continuity program

• What action you can take to prepare your business

Rather than rehash the papers, you can find all five here if you need to catch up:  http://www.accinctus.com/index.php/downloads/item/31-business-continuity-awareness-week

Logical reasons, costs, laws, benefits, and steps to take action – all important, valid topics but in many cases they may not be very exciting because they focus on the “Mr. Spock” approach. 

In speaking to different business owners and leaders, sometimes I find it is difficult for people to understand these ideas related to risk, costs, and the need to be proactive.  Deciding to do anything to prepare their business can be even more difficult.  Inaction is easy to justify because people feel that doing something costs lots of money or time, or isn’t needed because they think insurance will cover it all, or because they just don’t think anything bad will happen.  As Spock would say, “Those justifications are highly illogical.” 

To prepare for the spring and summer severe weather season across the country, NOAA and FEMA are sponsoring the National Severe Weather Preparedness Week from March 2-8, 2014.  This year’s theme is “Be A Force of Nature” and is intended to make people across the country more aware of natural weather threats.  From NOAA National Climatic Data Center:  “In 2013, there were 7 weather and climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each across the United States. These events included five severe weather and tornado events, a major flood event, and the western drought / heat wave. Overall, these events killed 109 people and had significant economic effects on the areas impacted.”

I was talking to a group of business owners at a networking event and I was informally describing what business continuity is.  My description was for them to think of the 2-3 “what if” scenarios that if they happened, could significantly impact their businesses or shut it down.  I told them I help businesses turn those nightmare scenarios into less serious events through training, assessments, and proper planning.  I’d like to share a couple of observations from those conversations. 

A recent article in The Gazette (Fire, flooding take a big bite out of 2013 hotel business in Colorado Springs area, by Wayne Heilman) discussed the impacts of recent fires and floods on the Colorado Springs area in the last two years, particularly on the hospitality industry.  During this time the region has faced more national headline grabbing disasters (Waldo Canyon & Black Forest Fires & the Manitou floods) than we’d like.  The long term impact on tourism and related industries is still being felt and it may be years before we can calculate the loss.  Add this to the businesses that were directly impacted by these events and the number grows significantly to something truly catastrophic. 

But what about the businesses that had suffered no damage from these events, were there negative impacts from these incidents even though not burned out or flooded?  From a business continuity standpoint I absolutely believe the answer is yes.  Three areas I think businesses are impacted in this way are geographic association, employee confidence, and company reputation. 

Are you a business owner, manager, CEO, president, safety manager, or someone in authority in your company?  If so, you should know the answer to the two questions in the title – what is an EAP and do you need one?  The short answer is an EAP is an Emergency Action Plan (EAP) and the answer is YES, you need one.  Now let me ask one more question – does your company have an EAP?  Let’s get back to that question in a moment.

An Emergency Action Plan is a written document REQUIRED by OSHA standard 29 CFR 1910.38 that defines your employees’ actions during an emergency.  An EAP is direction for your employees, it is not a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) or Disaster Recovery (DR) Plan to recovery your business or IT operations.  The standard has minimum elements you must address including emergency reporting procedures, evacuation processes, employee accountability and also other recommended elements.  From my experience in developing EAPs for different organizations and training their personnel on those procedures, I have a list of additional topics to address that will increase the value of your EAP rather than just meeting the minimums. 

“Cold enough for you?” Whether you’ve read the line in a book, heard it in a movie, or started a conversation in real life with the phrase, it’s a funny question that isn’t quite as humorous right now.  This week while most of our country is trying to figure out what a “polar vortex” is and how long this bitter cold will last, the focus has been on closed schools, snow accumulation totals, and family members across the country bragging who’s suffering the coldest temperatures.  But for a moment, I’d like to bring the focus of this crazy winter weather on the impact on business. 

Friday the 13^th – the day of bad luck, ill omens, and the risk of terrible events.  The day that has inspired bad movies, practical jokes, and spooky ghost stories.  So, did anything bad happen to you today?  Did you stub your toe, break your arm, or get an audit letter from the IRS?  No – that’s good.  What about at work, at your business, anything frightening or catastrophic happen there today?  No again, well great – you’re safe until the next Friday the 13^th because everyone knows that bad things ONLY happen on Friday the 13^th.  Right?

With the holidays fast approaching businesses are entering that stretch of time when large numbers of employees are out for family activities or just trying to use up those vacation days before the end of the year.  It’s very likely that key members of your staff will be out of the office.  It’s always good when we can get out of the office and recharge our batteries a bit and spend precious time with our family and friends, but from a continuity perspective, this can be an increased risk if you don’t take the proper precautions.