Where is your office emergency manual? If you can’t answer that question within a few seconds, it’s not much help to you in case of an emergency. What about your office emergency management team? Do they have a plan?
No one wants to encounter an emergency at work, but everyone should be prepared for emergencies. Having an office emergency management team made up of trained employees and offering training can significantly reduce the risk of group panic, injury and other risks that threaten your employees’ well-being.
Natural Disasters and Fires
Some things are universal. Every business needs a fire plan. Every business needs a first-aid kit. And every business needs to provide access for employees to dial 911. (How long would it take an employee in the warehouse to reach an outside line? It should take seconds, not minutes.)
To keep reading, click here: Revamping Your Office Emergency Management Protocol
Weather emergencies too. Our office had a hotline for weather emergencies to be used if the board approved a weather closure. But when bad weather came, the board could not be convened in the wee hours when approval was needed, and besides, employees had not been told the hotline number lest they get the idea that attendance might ever be optional. So people afraid of being fired risked their lives on officially closed roads and arrived to find the building locked. Not good for employee loyalty.
I’ve had similar experiences. My old office had a “calling tree,” where people would call to inform coworkers of emergencies involving the office. However, the boss at the top always waited too late to start the chain of calls, resulting in many of those farther down the “tree” not being called until after the time they already had to leave for work. For weather-related closures, I urged him to go along with the decisions of our local school district, which inspected driving conditions all over town, only called off school when it was genuinely unsafe to commute, always made its decision by 6:00 a.m., and made its decisions publicly-accessible via the media, the school district’s website and voicemail message, etc. He resisted doing so. Several times, I — and other employees — arrived at work only to find the office closed, and/or the power was out. One time, the basement of the building was flooded, putting the elevators out of service (and we were on an upper floor, inaccessible to the mobility-impaired, including me). The worst was the time I had to drive through an ice storm, and conditions were so bad, my wiper blades and one of the wheels on my car were damaged.