To handle an emergency, sites often designate employees to be part of emergency response teams and recovery teams. Depending on the size of your site, these may be distinct roles or the functions may be handled by the same person.
Note: See Creating a Recovery Team List for information on assigning employees to recovery teams.
The following are typical jobs of the emergency response and recovery teams:
Ensuring employee safety is a top priority. As a member of the emergency response team, you may need to aid first responders in accounting for employees by providing them with the following reports:
Once employees are evacuated and accounted for, you will want to record their status in the system so that this information is available to management and others overseeing the recovery effort. There are two methods:
In the event that an employee has been injured or is missing during an emergency, you'll want to inform the employee's contacts about the situation. Typically, business process owners at your site have established emergency contact information for each employee.
Use these tasks to access employees' emergency contacts:
Typically, business process owners or others at your site have previously established a list of companies, clients, government agencies, insurance companies, vendors, and other parties, that your company will want to inform if an emergency occurs. As a member of the emergency response team, you may need to inform these parties that an emergency has occurred that may disrupt normal business and operations. You may need to explain the effects of the emergency, such as that shipping will be delayed, meetings have been postponed, inspections will be needed, and so on.
Use the following tasks to access a list of your company's emergency contacts:
During an emergency, you may find that additional parties should be added to this list so that they are readily available in the event of future emergencies. The list is typically maintained by your site's business process owner. See Creating an Emergency Contacts List.
General staff and managers can sign in from home to check the status of the situation and determine whether they should report to a contingency location, work from home, take a day off, and so on. As a member of the recovery team, you create these bulletins that inform staff and management of the current conditions. To do so, run this task:
In order to begin recovery processes, you need to find new locations for employees. Some sites define contingency locations for employees in the event that their office becomes unusable during an emergency. Check an employee's contingency location with these tasks:
To resume operations, a company might need to quickly buy new furniture or lease new space. As a Recovery Team Member, you may not normally have authority to make these purchases or decisions. However, if your site has established an escalation contacts list – staff who have authority in an emergency to expedite decisions and purchases – you can inform this staff of your needs and get the process started. Consult your escalation contacts with this task: