If hurricane season has you feeling a little jumpy, you’re not alone. It is obviously a time of great uncertainty and fear, and this doesn’t just mean on a personal note — businesses, too! If you’re looking at making sure that your business is ready for hurricane season, you’ll want to use these tips to help guide you. Keep in mind, that this is something you should have anyways, in case any natural disaster occurs, or even something so debilitating like a power outage.
Planning for natural disasters or outages
Have a meeting with everyone to discuss it as a business
This is one staff meeting that everyone may actually pay attention to! Meet as a company and discuss the safety protocols, potentially how your business operations may change, and whatever else they need to know. Clear communication from the top down is going to help increase trust and comfort in the company as a whole, as well as the situations that could/may arise.
Make sure you have enough emergency kits
Depending upon how large your office is, you should have enough emergency kits and supplies to cover all of your employees and the needs for an extended period of time. Think outside of the box and not just medical supplies but batteries, water and maybe snacks in case you are stuck in your office for longer than a few hours. This is stuff that you can eventually use at the end of the year and just buy again before the season or keep ample on hand. Just remember to keep an eye on expiration dates – that includes medical supplies and/or food. Proper preparedness in case anyone is storm-stayed is important! Not only should those kits be ready to go, but you’ll also want to make sure that everyone has access to them.
Have up-to-date emergency contact numbers for all employees
Another huge detail to keep in mind is ensuring that you have emergency contact numbers for every single person. Making sure all of that critical information is up to date will help minimize chaos in case family members need to be contacted to let them know that everyone is safe when a hurricane or other natural disaster hits.
Protect as much as you can with safes, cloud storage, etc
As a team, you can delegate preparedness tasks to help get the business ready to go. For instance, backing up all electronic data, making sure that safes protecting paperwork are locked and safe should wind or flooding waters present. Security for your business such as processes, intellectual property, employee and client files should already be secure, but this is a great time to double and triple check.
Having everyone come together as a team to prepare can help make sure that the site is secure. This keeps the employees engaged and the understand the total process as well. Should you need some guidance on your team training and delegating, a business coach can definitely lend a hand with respect to organizing details, delegation and team building or team learning.
Be ready to work remotely
One of the best ways that you can help keep staff safe is by making sure that everyone knows they have the option of working remotely in case of a hurricane warning, power outages or other natural disaster. This will help many people feel a lot better, too, since most will want to be secure at home with their loved ones if a warning does occur. With that being said, again you will walk to ensure your business intel is safe and secure and that you have already explained how working from home or remotely will work as in who is doing what, answering phones, emails and their typical day to day work. It’s always a great idea to include the employees in these planning steps so they feel more of a team and not just a number.
Run drills & practice
Silly, perhaps, but helpful. Chaos happens quickly in real life, so knowing that everyone knows how to run a drill if needed can help both oil the machine, should it ever come to that, and help companies know where the weaknesses are, too. Sometimes this may be just running scenarios in different manners, like what happens if we are all at work and X happens or what happens if it’s time for everyone to leave for work and Y happens, or what if you are at lunch and Z happens. These are all great drills, or scenarios, to practice and go over.
A business coach can help every company get the right guidance to prepare itself as a whole, as well as all of its parts, for a potential disaster any time of the year. Being prepared makes one feel so much better and in the time of chaos, this is ever the more important. It can help ease the jumpiness just a little bit, across the board, and it also means that they can help you spot any potential weak links or hiccups!
TeamRXC offers various coaching options – one to one coaching, executive coaching and also team or group coaching which might make more sense in this type of situation, maybe after having a pre-planning session with the top executives or owners. Contact Team Stetzel at (281) 217-4951.
