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What is National Preparedness Month?
It’s September, and that means National Preparedness Month. In observance each September, the National Preparedness Month initiative seeks to raise awareness about the importance of preparing for disasters and emergencies that could happen at any time. And those critical events have been on the sharp rise, especially in climate vulnerable areas. So, how then to get prepared during Preparedness Month?
Overcoming resilience challenges to make the most of National Preparedness Month
For starters, getting prepared for crises is all about understanding where challenges and blind spots are. As for many, building a preparedness capability will be a relatively new initiative. Senior leaders, by in large, only built up that capability as result of their experiences during COVID.
However, in many organizations, that acute awareness of the need to prepare hasn’t trickled down to staff. Survey data, for instance, points to the fact that 40 per cent of management teams are very aware of the role of resilience in the organization. On the other side, only 16 per cent of staff is.
That’s not the only challenge to getting prepared, either.
COVID has made being prepared more difficult, as well. Workforces are more geographically fragmented than ever.
UK data, for instance, shows that almost a third of businesses aren’t certain what proportion of their employees will be working remotely in the future.
Further challenges to getting prepared to manage critical events include:
- Lack of 100 per cent reach
- System downtime
- Inability to measure the impact or size of the critical event
- Ineffective inter-departmental communication and coordination
- Lack of integration with key business systems
- Limited ability to respond quickly
Investments to make this National Preparedness Month
What can be done to overcome these challenges? Here, organizations should consider investing in critical event management software this National Preparedness Month.
These are solutions and related services designed to manage an organization’s preparation, response, and recovery from events that impact continuity, operations, and safety.
But not just high-impact events, though. Critical event management solutions can help organizations handle lower-impact events and critical issues, as well.
Why does it matter? It helps to use the same tools to manage routine, smaller issues as well as larger impact events.
Of course, basic benefits come from simply digitizing critical event management strategies. After all, many organizations remain reliant on manual processes.
What other components matter? Well, according to independent analysts, the following are worth considering:
- Emergency mass notification tools for targeted communications. Enables effective crisis and emergency communications to impacted individuals and response teams.
- Employee-tracking to maintain duty of care. Enables the identification of threats to relevant personnel wherever they are. Personnel can leverage these capabilities if they themselves feel threatened or during critical events to alert employers of their status.
- Incident management to improve the efficiency of emergency response. Serves as centralized hubs, or virtual emergency operations centers, to process incoming situational and risk data and manage the response effort. Offers response teams an in-depth view into critical events.
But those components only scratch the surface of the capabilities you’ll need to make the most of National Preparedness Month. For the comprehensive list, download our Buyer’s Guide to Critical Event Management.
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