Business Continuity For Dummies

Encourage Staff to Be Flexible in Their Roles and Responsibilities

You may have particular people in mind for handling certain tasks in an emergency, but things may not go quite to plan in reality. Encourage your staff to multi-skill in their everyday roles so that they adapt more easily during a crisis. Incentivise taking on different positions by offering extra pay or emphasising the experience that this adds to employees’ CVs. Communicate the benefits of multi-tasking and taking on new responsibilities, and offer temporary promotions to take over from absent staff.

Encourage staff to work in different teams and put new combinations of staff together to facilitate wider communication throughout the workforce. Don’t create single points of failure by having only one person trained to understand a certain system. Also, remember that people act differently under stress, and just because someone performs well in an exercise doesn’t mean that the person won’t need help on the day.

Plan in advance and communicate that plan clearly: prepare a shift pattern or think of a way of incentivising overtime, such as with added pay or responsibilities. Test the practicalities of working from a different location and explain clearly to staff how to organise the set-up and machinery of your organisation ...