Roberta J. Witty
1. We started the workshop by viewing the video “Business Not As Usual: Preparing for Pandemic Flu” from Seattle-King county. Use it internally to educate your workforce (and senior executives) on the value of being prepared. You can request a free copy (you must pay for shipping) from NACCHO.
2. Most of the workforce absences are expected to be a result of school closures.
3. You must have a pandemic management process (or infrastructure) in place to handle the event as it occurs because plans are a necessary thing, but they don’t often reflect the reality of the specific situation. Policies decided upon on Monday may not apply to the facts of Tuesday’s situation.
4. Some firms are talking to public health officials about hosting vaccine programs in their work facilities, or at least trying to secure the vaccine for their critical workers, e.g. electricity generation operators. However, some are concerned about the legal liability issues if they haven’t engaged in this type of public health activity in the past.
5. On the point of electricity generation operators – If these folks get the flu, and the generation facility is on the small side, they could shut it down because they don’t have enough staff to operate. That shutdown means blackouts – or “rotating feeder outages”. We could see more power outages as a result of H1N1 – a connection that most folks aren’t making, but for pandemic planning would be covered under the traditional BCM plan.
6. Organizations are struggling with human resource policies regarding how to compensate workers if they do have the flu, especially if the worker has already used their allotted personal time off days or sick days. Some are offering extended time off options, but not everyone.
7. Work-at-home solutions are at a high risk of failure if the work-at-home population in any given area reaches anywhere close to the 40% absentee rate. Internet bandwidth supply is not adequate to meet the demand. (Gartner is publishing a research note on this topic specifically.)
8. Similar to the results of my June/2009 survey, many firms are not including IT vendors or IT service providers in their efforts. See my note: A Perilous Practice: Not Planning for IT and Data Center Operations Support During a Pandemic, G00169949. (You may have to be a Gartner client to view it.)
9. Most firms expect to implement workforce travel restrictions once a pandemic strikes.
10. Most firms are trying to balance their protective mask usage policy between protecting the workforce and not offending customers. The firms who have direct and frequent contact with the public (for example retail operations) request that workers wear a mask when escorting a sick person out of the building only. Those firms that don’t have direct public contact public allow their workers to wear masks based upon their personal comfort level.
11. Those firms that have public congregation areas plan to close off those areas once a pandemic strikes. For example, bank branch lobbies will be closed and only the drive-up window will be open.
12. Firms with workers who must make home visits have equipped those workers with protective gear such as masks, sanitizer fluid for the hands and steering wheels of their cars/trucks, disposable gloves and so forth.
13. You can’t build your preparedness plans using workers’ personal information that has been gathered through the normal social networking in the work environment.
14. Some firms are concerned about law suits as a result of family members getting the flu from the firm’s employee.
15. You can’t expect to get resources from your local neighbors, partners and so forth because everyone will be in the same situation when the pandemic strikes.
16. Your plans and handling process must include actions that will assist you to return to normal operations once the pandemic is over.
17. You must include cultural differences in your plan activities. For example, blood transfusions may be refused if they are not from a person with the same national origin as the intended recipient.
Category: Advisory Tags: Availability Risk, Availability Risk Backup and Recovery banking BCM BCP B, Backup and Recovery, BCM, BCP, BIA, Business Continuity Management, Business Continuity Planning, Business Impact Analysis, Business Resiliency, Contingency Planning, Continuity of Operations, COOP, Crisis Management, Data Protection, Disaster Recovery, Emergency Notification, Emergency Preparedness, H1N1, Incident Management, IT Disaster Recovery, Mass Notification, Operational Risk Management, Pandemic Planning, Recovery Planning, Recovery Plans, Resiliency, Risk Assessment, swine flu, Workforce Continuity
2 responses so far ↓
1 John Tierney August 7, 2009 at 10:16 am
Hello,
Found reference to your post via a Twitter RSS feed I have set up for InfraGard.
Great post – Thanks for the NACCHO link, sounds like it will be useful for my company’s preparedness program.
.JT.
2 Karen Jones August 28, 2009 at 7:20 am
Thankyou for your 17 points summary. Very useful and informative.
I’d like to pick up on point 7 where you suggest that Broadband may be insufficient to cope with a high number of people working at home simultaneously. the problem I particularly foresee here is where homeworking solutions include IP telephony as well as secure data access. Reliance upon the PSTN network would be a far better option in my opinion, with calls on individual DDI numbers being re-routed to home phone lines or mobiles.
As I point out in my top ten tips for employing flexible working during a pandemic, this is easy to do and available to implement now in preparation for when the pandemic really takes hold.
http://www.gematech.com/blog/2009/07/28/swine-flu-top-ten-tips-for-employing-home-working-during-the-pandemic/