By Paul Waadevig
Senior Consultant, Unified Communications
Frost & Sullivan
April 2009
In April, the Mexican government announced they were experiencing an outbreak of a previously unknown strain of influenza. Within days, this spread outside Mexico, and the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) stated that "... a pandemic seems inevitable at this point." In response to the swine flu (or H1N1 influenza) virus, Mexico City virtually closed down for over two weeks, costing the local economy millions.
Shortly after the first cases were reported in the United States, President Obama warned Americans to prepare "contingency plans" in case schools and public transportation were shut down. At the writing of this article, there have been suspensions of some school classes in the US, Canada and some European countries as pockets of the swine flu have surfaced, but the overall impact the virus may have is unclear. In the deadly 1918 flu pandemic that killed millions of people, the virus mutated several times causing waves of sickness worldwide. The WHO is concerned this may happen with the H1N1 virus as well.
Regardless of the immediate impact of the swine flu, this should serve as a "wake up call" to companies to ensure they have contingency plans that will allow their knowledge workers to continue to be productive in emergencies. Clearly, a number of workers are going to be required to report to work due to the nature of their jobs; but in a knowledge-based economy, a large percentage of workers could work remotely for a short period of time with minimal impact on productivity.
However, this will require formulating a plan and changing existing IT and communications infrastructure. Seven important tips when preparing for crises:
- Have a stated policy in place for school or work closures or mass transit shutdowns. This should include how, when and why qualified workers can work from home and how to notify the company.
- Contract with a Crisis Alert Service to notify your employees of office closures.
- Increase the scalability of your communications resources. During a crisis, your knowledge workers will need to conference more often and for longer periods. This is one of the advantages of using conferencing service providers as your primary vendor. During a spike, you won't need to worry about having the ports and/or bandwidth needed to support the additional audio, video and web conferencing for temporarily remote workers.
- Begin converting infrastructure from desktop stations to laptop computers. With the cost of laptops approaching parity with desktop units, consider moving many of your employees to laptops during upgrades/conversions or Greenfield deployment.
- Ensure a secure connection with corporate servers through a remote VPN and institute remote working protocols that with comply with regulations such as HIPPA.
- Consider XML based access your email servers. This will allow workers to access their secure corporate email from any browser-equipped computer.
- You may also want to consider a drill or dry run where departments are told to stay home for one day. While this may seem drastic, it will allow you to monitor results in a controlled fashion before facing the external chaos that will inevitably accompany a company-wide crisis.
Ultimately, crisis management is intended to mitigate human capital risk in the same way insurance mitigates the risk to hard capital assets. Whether it's a loss of an office, vehicle fleet or manufacturing facility due to a catastrophic event or loss of workers due to a pandemic, the result is the same: potentially losing millions of dollars in revenue. A well-thought-out crisis contingency plan allowing employees to remain productive and communicate efficiently will minimize the potential impact of the scenario we could face with a widespread flu pandemic.