Are You Prepared to Have Your People Not Show Up?
Disaster Planning for Work Stoppages

– by Victoria Ladd-de Graff and Dr. Thomas D. Phelan

You’ve heard it said many times that people are our most important business resource. As you work your way through a Business Impact Analysis and prepare contingency plans or Business Resumption Plans, do you stop to consider the impact of losing your people to a regional natural disaster or a strike? Do you take for granted that your employees will show up, no matter what?
In a recent discussion with a telecom supervisor at a customer service telephone center, the question was asked, “Can you disconnect the voicemail of the striking workers to prevent them from using it as an electronic message board?” The supervisor responded that selective disconnects were possible. The next question was who would do it, who is the backup, and can we see the written procedure for accomplishing the task.
“Why do you ask?” she responded. “I’m the person who will do the work.”
We stated that we needed to know who would do it if she weren’t there, and if no one with knowledge of the procedure showed up, we needed to perform the function from a written procedure. We even offered her two management employees who could receive “just in time” training in advance of the contract expiration date.
Just that one example may be repeated many times over in an organization if careful attention is not given to the possibility that your people might not be on the job either due to devastation in the community or a labor strike.
From our experience in preparing for employee unavailability, regardless of the reason, we’ve learned a few lessons we’d like to share with DRJ readers. Since we adhere to Incident Command System (ICS) principles, our lessons learned might be grouped in five categories: Command, Operations, Planning, Logistics, and Finance/Administration.
Command:
Assure that Policy Development is sufficient to support a work stoppage.
- Compensation Plan for those management employees that come to work.
- Create one plan design for collecting contingency plan summaries from each department.
- Establish policy on vacations and recalls from vacations.
- Involve senior management from the start of your planning. Arrange to have them in a Command Post during the emergency.
Operations:
Be certain that all critical operating groups have completed contingency plans.
- Clearly state what operations will be continued and what operations will be discontinued if staff is severely limited.
- Get a clear picture from operations as to what it will take to run the enterprise.
- Plan training for the skeleton crew in advance of an actual emergency involving a work stoppage.
- Force the most critical functions to select their people first from the list of available employees. Failure to do this will create many shifts in staff deployment later on.
Planning:
Centralize the planning function so that duplication is avoided.
- Create a single database for keeping track of re-deployment of staff.
- Collect employee information in advance on prior training and work experience.
- Collect health and personal data that may limit an employee’s reassignment (back problems, small children at home, etc.).
- Plan for all support services required to keep the skeleton crews fed, housed, transported, etc.
- Plan for backups in each critical function.
Logistics:
Plan in advance for everything that has to move in and out of a facility during a work stoppage (the mail, food, supplies, even the employees themselves).
- Plan for personal protective gear (hard hats, work boots, safety glasses, etc. for each management employee re-deployed to an operating job.
- Plan for lodging, telecommunications, and EAP support for a workforce working longer than normal hours.
Finance/Administration:
Set up special account codes for the anticipated emergency. Do this far enough in advance to include expenditures for training and purchase of safety gear.
- Be certain managers are aware of the special account codes so that they use them for all emergency planning activities associated with a potential strike.
- Decide in advance who will make financial decisions during the emergency.
- Be certain that the finance operations of the enterprise are not hampered by the absence of people. Arrange in advance for pick up and delivery of bank deposits, customer bills to be mailed, and people to process the incoming payments.
These are some of the things you might consider if one morning you come to work as the manager and find that your employees aren’t there. Do you know, for example, how to contact all of your management employees at their homes? Are you prepared to answer their questions about crossing a picket line, or where to park their vehicles, or how long they might have to be on duty? If not, consider conducting a Business Impact Analyst for your department or company as soon as possible with a focus on personnel.

Victoria Ladd-de Graff is a Business Analyst in Emergency Planning at Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation in Syracuse.
Dr. Phelan is a Board Member of PPBI and a PPBI Instructor; Treasurer, Business Network of Emergency Resources, Inc.; and an active member of the American Red Cross Disaster Services Human Resource Team and the National Disaster Mortuary Operational Resource Team (D-MORT Command).
At PPBI, we help organizations address these concerns in our courses on building effective partnerships and command post management. Check us out at the DRJ in Orlando this September, or on DRJ.com or PPBI.org.

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