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This year, effective emergency preparedness will be the cornerstone of enterprise resilience. Despite the high stakes, data suggests many organizations are falling behind.
Read on to learn the emergency preparedness you’ll need to stay ahead of disruption.
How prepared are organizations for crisis?
Indeed, organizations have their work cut out for them this year. As sources of disruption increase, the research suggests that levels of emergency preparedness aren’t where they need to be:
- Lack of documentation: Nearly a quarter of American employees revealed that their companies have no written emergency preparedness plan.
- Inadequate training: More than a quarter of international employees cite a lack of training as their “Achilles’ Heel.”
- Missing practice: Less than 60% of American employees have participated in a formal emergency drill or simulation.
- Infrequent testing: Nearly a quarter of international companies test their emergency preparedness plan only once every two years – or even less.
Although these numbers might seem manageable at first glance, the reality is: disruption has become well-nigh inevitable. Half of all employees admit that their company has already weathered an emergency.
The power of crisis management exercises
To strengthen emergency preparedness, organizations must commit to a program of rigorous crisis management exercising.
A proactive event, a crisis management exercise simulates crisis conditions, giving personnel the opportunity to practice and gain proficiency in their plan roles before a crisis strikes.
Of course, choosing the right crisis management exercise for your resilience needs matters. For instance, operations-based exercises work best when there’s a concrete need for strong realism and real-time simulation. In contrast, organizations might opt for discussion-based exercises to make use of a more a seminar-based approach.
Beyond these two types of exercise, organizations can deploy specialized tests to enhance emergency preparedness. The major categories include:
- Alert exercise. Tests the ability of participants to reach a designated place within a certain time.
- Start exercise. Measures how fast the emergency management organization can carry out tasks after activation.
- Staff exercise. Focuses on internal processes and information routines to create a common operational picture across teams.
- Decision exercise. Challenges organizational decision-making under extreme time pressure.
- Management exercise. A combination of alert, start, staff, and decision exercises that tests organizational roles and standard operating procedures.
- Cooperation exercise. Evaluates coordination between management levels, either
- “Vertically” between national, regional, and local levels; or,
- “Horizontally” within a sector.
- Strategic exercise. Higher-level simulations (e.g., for inter-ministerial crisis staff or the C-suite) to improve the reaction to exceptional threat and danger situations.
Key pillars of emergency preparedness
The type of crisis management exercise isn’t the only factor to consider in emergency preparedness. Three other pillars stand out, as well:
- Clear goals. Establishing specific, achievable goals as early as possible in the planning process is essential for extracting meaningful learnings afterward.
- Strategic scenarios. Beyond scenario selection, development provides another pillar of emergency preparedness. Unsurprisingly, certain exercise goals are easier to achieve in certain exercise formats.
For instance, organizations will have to decide on the necessary level of detail and realism in the exercise. Although it might seem like a no-brainer to introduce as much detail as possible in a scenario, research has shown that “detail bloat” overloads participants with too much information, causing frustration during the actual exercise.
- The right people. Which brings us to participants. The goals and type of exercise should dictate who participates in the scenario. Beyond key decision makers and a strong moderator, the number of participants should affect the format. A group of ten requires a very different approach than a group of fifty.
Next steps for emergency preparedness
What else can organizations do to prepare for the resilience emergencies likely to crop up in the new year? Well, Chief Resilience Officers (CROs) should master the best-practice procedures needed to plan, implement, manage, evaluate, report, and improve exercises. To get them started, we created a CRO’s Guide to International Crisis Testing Standard ISO 22398.
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