Skip to main content

How Emergency Management Can Fit into Businesses While Taking the Burden off HR

By
Guest Post By Kendall Herbert, Emergency Management Specialist


Accidents, Emergencies, and Natural Disasters happen every day, and their repercussions can affect everyone. Emergency managers are the experts who assist work centers and businesses to prepare for, respond to, and recover from a wide range of emergencies that could happen. Some insight they offer are:
·       Preparedness: Informing and preparing employees for any type of hazard they could encounter, such as natural or man-made disasters. As the saying goes “Failing to prepare, is preparing to fail” via Benjamin Franklin.
·       Planning: Many plans and procedures can be created to lessen the impact from disasters. Some typical plans include:
o   Business Continuity Plan: This will be a guideline for how business will be conducted when an incident or accident occurs.
o   Evacuation Plans: When there is a fire or other emergency, employees need to know how to evacuate the work center and rendezvous in the designated safe meeting place.
o   Evaluating Risks: Every location is different and so are the risks. These variables can factor in potential vulnerabilities that could affect a business. Some examples are earthquakes, hurricanes, or railyard accidents.
o   Mutual Aid Agreements (MAA) / Mutual Understanding Agreements (MUA): MAAs and MUAs are used between different organizations to assist one another throughout the entire incident.
·       Recovery: After an incident occurs, everything will not magically fix itself. Emergency mangers create plans and understand how to get the ball rolling during the recovery operations.
·       Mitigation: This is used to limit the effects or losses during incidents and makes it easier to recover.

Emergency managers are an asset to all organizations all shapes or sizes. Nobody has the ability to stop disasters from happening, but emergency managers will utilize their knowledge to help businesses prepare for the inevitable, and have a smoother recovery process. Businesses can have emergency managers in place to prepare, plan, and recover from these emergencies, and in return would allow everyone to get back to work sooner. Who wants to say no to more time working, quicker recovery processes, and less damages?

How prepared is your organization?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you for your comment.

Popular posts from this blog

55 Active Job Search Sites (Updated 7/19)

By
I had a company encouraging me to update this list over the last couple of months.  Since they focus on veteran hiring and I am a veteran supporting other veterans I am happy to add the following to this original posting from 2017. Silent Professionals is a free veteran recruitment service. Their differentiating factor is that they focus on a very specific subset of veteran employment which is the combat arms veteran. Their site is much more than just a job board because they actually provide a service behind it which is all free to the veteran. As combat veterans themselves, with a vast amount of experience in the private security sector, they are able to use that experience and influence within the industry to act as trusted advocates for the veteran candidate. They boast an incredible 84% job placement success rate for candidates that they recommend to employers. One of the reasons they're able to do that is because of their focus on jobs for combat veterans who are seek...
Post a Comment
Read more

MORE Consolidated List of SHRM Certification Announcement Posts with LINKS (Updated)

By
UPDATE 5/21: Added one more post and link below from Workforce.com not found last night when I originally wrote this post. On the eve of my attempt to help our local CIC-SHRM members make sense of the news of last week at our bi-monthly meeting tomorrow, I did another search. Again, I will wait to comment fully about my own understanding and opinions until after I get a response from SHRM regarding a question I have that has yet to be addressed and I hear again from our regional MAC rep on a call I am scheduled to participate in on Thursday. However, I do want to rescind and revise a comment I made in my earlier post. Last week I stated the following which is not entirely true: “The fact that the HRCI Executive Director did not receive advance notification leaves me a bit disappointed for a variety of reasons.” The HRCI Executive Director did know about SHRMs plans because she is part of the board where the topic was discussed. However, she did not know the communication would go...
Post a Comment
Read more

Transgender Drug Testing

By
Recently, a client asked me if they needed to adjust their drug testing policy so a transgender employee could choose the gender of the person observing them urinate for a test. Obviously, the person wanted the employee to feel comfortable with who was in the room with them. First of all, having another employee watch you urinate can be uncomfortable for anyone, for any reason, but it is a requirement for some drug tests in order to ensure that the testee doesn’t bring in a bag of someone else’s urine to exchange as their own. If the reason is not obvious, it is so they do not test positive when they know they have been under the influence of drugs or alcohol. So, I did some research and thought it would be good to share this information for other employers, managers, small business owners and HR managers who may have similar questions. What are the requirements to be an observer for a direct observed collection? According to the Mandatory Guidelines for Federal Workplace Drug Testing ...
Post a Comment
Read more