Premises and Assets: Preparing and Taking Precautions

This section contains some easy measures to take to protect your business buildings (and the people inside them) and keep your assets safe:

Plan the evacuation of your building. Consider how you’re going to evacuate the building and how you can ensure that everyone gets out safely, taking into consideration those with less mobility. Plan where you’re going to evacuate to and assemble.

Now, imagine that the exit you intend to use is blocked and the congregation area you select is cordoned off. Plan your contingency arrangements to deal with these problems. Also consider:

• Your way of alerting people to an evacuation. Shouting or blowing a whistle may be the quickest and easiest method. But make sure that staff are aware of the plans in advance and that you test them . . . while you have the chance. An evacuation situation is not one where you want to be relying on lessons learned for the next time during a real event. You need an effective way of communicating to people.

• Your routes of escape. Even if you or staff members are working from home, ensure that you can open an upstairs window and throw a mattress out to soften your landing, in case you have to climb out, hang from the window ledge and drop onto the mattress. In an office you can test the effectiveness of your safe route by timing you and your team.

Panic and other potential difficulties, such as heat and smoke, mean that these tasks may well take two or three times longer in a real-life situation than during a test scenario. If appropriate, mark exit routes along walls or on the floor.

• How you or your staff are going to dial 999. If everyone makes it safely out of the building but nobody has a mobile phone, or no signal is available, where are you going to go to raise the alarm? Check for premises nearby and public call boxes.

Consider ‘invacuation’ (taking shelter where you are). Invacuation is a relatively new word and pretty much means remain where you are, identify the safest place to be and stay inside. This place may be the cupboard under the stairs if you work from home or the core of the building in offices.

Basements and cellars are often cited as being the best place (if you have one and flooding isn’t a problem), but check that you can get a mobile phone signal to notify people that you’re safe and whether the basement is big enough for everyone to fit into.

Write a list of what you’d want in the basement if you had to stay for a couple of hours and then get these items in. Although situations in which you and your staff need to invacuate may be uncommon, they do occur – for example, during bomb threats or following a contamination – so this precaution is worth taking.

Identify muster points, assembly areas and take care of immediate business. Of course you need to identify and communicate where everyone should meet up outside – such as the car park or the end of the road – to carry out a roll-call. But in addition to this initial muster point, for more prolonged periods, think of alternatives such as a cafe, pub or hotel that would be more comfortable. Wherever this alternative is, perform a roll-call of all who were in the building, remembering to account for any staff and visitors, and let the police know if anyone’s missing.

Later you could meet at your home or look to have a reciprocal agreement with another business premises to plan things in the immediate term. As time ticks by and minutes appear about to turn to hours, you need to keep your business activities going. Here are the key considerations connected to your temporary, alternative place of working:

• Does this place have Internet access?

• Do you have means of accessing the Internet, such as a laptop?

• Do you know what business needs to be done today, such as orders that need to be dispatched or invoices that need to be sent out?

• Can you get access to files through the Internet; for example, through cloud computing, where your business can hire storage areas held on remote machines to keep files and software applications, which means you can access files wherever you have a computer with an Internet connection.

If you realise when asking these questions that your business would be unable to carry on without access to your permanent site, consider how you can store information so that you can access it away from the office. Store any company property and information securely, such as in a box with a numerical padlock to which only relevant members of the firm know the code.

Don’t dispose of old equipment unless you have to. This particularly applies to specialist equipment that your business has replaced with newer items. Reconditioning the old equipment is worthwhile (if the cost is acceptable); hold it in reserve at another location or in storage. Even common equipment such as printers and fax machines, if they’re still working, is worth keeping as a standby along with ink cartridges. In the case of reusing old computer equipment, ensure that your IT team fixes them up regularly and downloads all relevant software patches.

Take digital photos of your office. This way you have evidence of what it looked like before it was burned down, ransacked, flooded or contaminated with toxic waste. The photos are useful for insurance purposes and to jog memories about what’s lost.

Identify any localised risks to your business premises. Who are your neighbours and what do they do? Carry out a quick search online against your postcode to see who works close by and the type of businesses they run. Take five minutes to walk around your local area, looking to see who does what and where. Think about potential risks within the environment or associated with the business; a business doesn’t have to be a multi-national petrol chemical plant to hold hazardous or inflammable substances.

Ask yourself: if something happened here, would my business’s

• Premises be affected (for example, from fire or fallout)?

• Buildings still be accessible?

• Stocks become contaminated with no contingency stocks available?

Make arrangements for a backup location. Use your local business network to find an alternative location for use during a crisis or disruption until recovery allows you back into your premises. The most cost-effective way is to find a business with spare capacity, within a similar sector to yours, in an adjoining district (near, but not too near) and not in direct competition with you. Speak with the owner about putting in place a reciprocal arrangement whereby in the event of a disruption your staff can work from those premises to carry out your firm’s critical business functions.

Serviced offices are another option. Provided the information and communication technology (ICT) is covered, a business can be up and running in hours. Some services provide access to PCs, printers and faxes at a moment’s notice. Cloud servers make an ideal alternative to physical storage and are likely to work out less expensive than buying backup hardware.

Find an alternative location that can receive your deliveries. So you’ve had a disruption and can’t get access to your site. All’s still well, however, because your staff are carrying out critical activities (taking orders, sending out invoices and so on) at a pre-arranged backup location. The trouble is that you need to receive some more goods and you have nowhere to receive them. In this situation, find a local warehousing firm that has suitable accommodation for your goods (dry, correct ambient temperature and so on). Ensure that the firm is likely to be able to receive a short-notice call to receive goods. Alternatively, use your business contacts to work out who you’d call in the event of needing some short-term space. Arrange this now and you’ve one less thing to worry about if the time comes.

Contact a local vehicle hire company. You need a vehicle, suitable for your business needs, and delivered to your door. If your business relies on a van to deliver goods, find a local rental firm that can replace it if yours is stolen or involved in an accident. An alternative is to use a reciprocal arrangement with another business or arrange to borrow a vehicle from friends or family.

In this latter case, make sure that you have the appropriate insurances in place.