- Establish a Pandemic preparedness framework
- Form a team that represents all critical business functions
- To assess the relative importance of business activities
- Organize them into tiers for response or recovery
- Monitor the situation to determine a change in severity
- Numerous sources of information can help you monitor the rate at which the infection is spreading and its severity
- Many Companies rely on comprehensive information found on WHO website
- Review finance and treasury implications
- Make sure to revise revenue forecasts
- Communicate with Investors and Suppliers about any potential financial issues
- It’s also critical to ensure that your Company has the working capital to ride out the storm
- Consider increasing the frequency of working capital checks
- Seeking loans or government sponsored financial relief to support cash flow
- Extend your clean workplace / personal hygiene protocols
- It’s critical to ensure that your Company complies with any new workplace regulations
- Establish handling protocols for staff returning from affected areas
- Extend your Company’s existing hygiene activities around cleaning and providing hygiene supplies
- Review HR Policies and Practices
- Closely monitor your Company’s absenteeism rate for any sign of a problem
- Identify critical staff and make sure your Company can continue to function in their absence
- Be as prepared as you can be for absentee rate of up to 40%
- Be sensitive to changes in employee engagement and workplace preferences
- Consider offering extra sick leave or a remote work program
- Other things to consider are possible repatriation of employees
- Visitor handling procedures
- Establish a Pandemic communications program
- People can feel out of the loop quickly, especially during a Pandemic
- Assign a spokesperson for the Company who is appropriate for the situation
- Establish a Pandemic communications program with pre-approved messages and scripts for various stakeholders, including employees, customers, supply chain partners, insurance companies, regulators and community public health officials
- Review impact on business operations
- Break down this potential task into activities or business areas
- The team formed in Step-1 should identify key areas to consider
- Understanding the reality on the ground in countries of operations is critical
- Assessing third parties for their exposures
- Is transport functioning?
- Have holidays been extended?
- Where can operations continue and where must they stop?
- Review IT actions and considerations
- IT as a business function tends to be relatively well-prepared in terms of business continuity
- Assess the supply chain for critical equipment and keep extra inventory if needed
- Look at remote Data Center Management and Cloud Options for critical systems
- Enable remote working programs
- Investigate alternative voice and chat options
- Reschedule non-essential IT work and prioritize key applications
- Use a preparedness exercise to review Pandemic plans and identify gaps in response
- Validate roles and responsibilities
- Validate recovery requirements and procedures
- Preparedness exercise, such as work-from-home drill or a table simulation that operates on a compressed time scale
- Identify any gaps in recovery capability and resource needs
- Assess whether team members can cope with their responsibilities and also promote collaboration between them
- Get feedback from the crisis management team
- After-action review
- Identify three lessons learned
- Key observations as a result of Pandemic planning
- Get each area to identify at least three areas for improvement in the exercise
- List and prioritize your short and long-term follow-up actions
- Schedule future exercises or results reports