Developing Your People Sense

Your business is about people. Your staff members are the difference between making a delivery or missing it, getting that contract or not, enjoying being at work or hating every minute, and between success and failure.

BC is one of the most cost-effective ways of:

Protecting your employees and their livelihoods.

Providing peace of mind for you and your staff.

Building team camaraderie within your firm.

In this section, we look at these three areas in a bit more detail.

Protecting your staff

Every organisation needs people and some need quite a few. But because people are human, they make mistakes that can cost you and them dearly. However, employing human beings also brings a vast wave of skills and endearing qualities that you just don’t get with machines and equipment. So, accepting that everyone makes mistakes, BC is a useful way of protecting your organisation from the impact of these errors and your employees from losing their jobs.

Ensuring peace of mind for you and your staff

Peace of mind stems from knowledge, shared understanding and confidence in your organisation and its ability to continue ‘whatever the weather’. Most of you can say that you’ve lived through a recession, and so you’re acutely aware of the anxiety that lean times cause where job security is at the forefront of every employee’s mind. Now, we aren’t pretending that BC is the panacea for all your business’s ills and woes, but it is a useful way of protecting your organisation from the impact of mistakes and disruptions.

How many times have you seen a seemingly minor disruption turn rapidly into a major crisis because the business failed to control the disruption at the start? BC can nip such situations in the bud by recognising the signs and helping you put measures in place to keep delivering your critical activities (we describe critical activities in Chapter 4). BC enables you to keep trading and equips your staff to deal with business-as-usual even when all may not be going so well. The knowledge that staff members build up when dealing with exercises (more on this in the following section) and real-life situations gives them confidence in the organisation and an understanding of what’s important, which would be difficult to achieve with anything other than BC.

People feel insecure when they fear the unknown. BC reduces this fear by arming staff with knowledge and skills to deal with disruptive events. Employees understand what’s critical to the organisation and how the part that they play in day-to-day business and during a disruption can have a major effect down the line. This knowledge and familiarity translates into a sense of job security that encourages people to focus on the things that matter and discourages your greatest asset from looking elsewhere. As a result, you retain staff and avoid the dreaded cost of recruitment.

Building team camaraderie within your firm

Even in a market where jobs are scarce and applications are plentiful, the situation doesn’t fundamentally change: good people are hard to get and keep hold of. Finding people with the requisite level of skills and experience to fit seamlessly into your organisation’s structure and culture is hard. You’re sure to spend time and money replacing them and your expertise is diluted if a ‘gap’ appears. When valued staff members leave, your firm experiences direct and indirect implications, and rectifying these can cost you. Here are just a few of the potential costs involved:

Time spent covering for the member of staff who needs replacing.

Direct recruitment costs.

The possibility of having to pay a higher salary.

Indirect costs, such as internal training and induction.

The interviewing and selection process.

Setting up new employees in your firm’s systems.

The time for a new staff member to develop the required knowledge.

Staff retention is important and BC assists by overtly showing an investment in employees and instilling confidence and resilience. We discuss this point further in Chapters 9 and 17. Investing in measures that protect people in the event of problems is a sound investment that encourages co-operative working, thus enabling your business to flourish.

BC fosters co-operative working within your staff through the continual improvement process that it embeds into an organisation. The initial stage of understanding what’s important to your business empowers staff members to look at the things they do in the context of the entire process. This wider viewpoint allows staff to identify dependencies by speaking to other colleagues, which in itself can open up ideas for new and better ways of working.

When you have BC in place, one of the most useful elements is to regularly test your recovery capability through the use of exercises. We look at testing, exercises and scenario-creation in Chapter 11.

A BC plan isn’t really a plan until you’ve tested it. Exercises provide you with reassurance, de-briefing, opportunities for discussion and lessons to take on board. In addition, a BC exercise:

Enables your staff to know what to do in a disrupting event, which can even save lives!

Acts as a team-building day, at the same time as being of real value to the business in other ways.

Provides feedback in a realistic situation that would be difficult to get in any other way.

You can hold an exercise anywhere that suits your business, on any scenario that you choose, and can involve anything that you want. As long as the scenario is feasible and allows you to test the assumptions you make in your plans and the associated arrangements, testing becomes very worthwhile. Another achievement is your staff acting confidently in a positive way at a time of disruption. And testing provides the opportunity for you to empower staff to take leadership roles that can assist in their development.

By investing in BC arrangements, you’re directly investing in your business and your staff.