Prevention and risk mitigation is all well and good when it comes to protecting your business. Keeping it secure and as safe as possible is always a wise and worthwhile move, but you should still anticipate that at some time, an emergency may arise. It might be medical in nature, it could be a fire, a blackout, or even a cyberattack. Regardless of what it is, you need to put in place the emergency plan to ensure that your team is able to handle it.
Make it policy
The first thing you need to learn is that you should never leave it up to chance that you’re going to know how to act when the time comes to deal with an emergency. You might want to work with an emergency preparedness consultant who can ensure that you have concrete plans in place, such as where your team should head, how communications should be handled, and what you can do to help everyone stay calm and get through the situation as safely as responsibly as possible
Ensure everyone’s role
Of course, if you want to put an emergency plan in place, you should also make sure that you know everyone’s place in that plan. To that end, you should look at the roles everyone should play and what training you may need to offer them to help them perform it properly. Management roles may already be in a good position to help lead and organize groups, but you might want to look at what first aid training, fire safety training, and other kinds of emergency situation training you should begin investing in. Give your team active roles and make sure that they’re adequately prepared for them so that they can handle emergencies with some confidence.
Prepare the workplace
It’s not just your team that you should be thinking about, but the workplace that you’re in, as well. Aside from performing risk assessments to make sure that you can reduce those risks as best as possible, you should prepare them in the event of an emergency. This can mean investing in first aid equipment, and fire safety equipment, and should definitely mean having an emergency exit, complete with an emergency exit light and whatever other markers are necessary to point your team in that direction. The workplace can play a big role in keeping everyone safe, too.
Practice makes perfect
Just as you should have the policy in place and roles for your team to play in the event of an emergency, you should make sure that you have a good idea of how that’s actually going to play out. Carrying out safety drills in the workplace can make a huge difference in the event of an actual emergency. Plan to carry out at least one or two per year so that you can revise your policies and plans depending on how the drills go.
With the tips above, you can improve your chances of getting through a real workplace emergency significantly. Don’t wait until it’s too late to start preparing.