CHAPTER 9: PEOPLE AND BCM

Quite simply, people are the most important element in business continuity. By using the term people, the scope should not be restricted exclusively to the staff and employees of the organization. There are other stakeholders whom the organization is required, by law and ethics, to protect and produce proper plans for.

BCM programs should be focused around people. First, they are the critical success factor for the BCM plans and they can also be the most vulnerable and prone to impacts and events during disasters. Fatalities, injuries, traumas, fear, demoralization, income loss, etc. are all examples of serious effects that can affect the people relevant to the organization, whether they are employees, families of employees, customers and clients, the general public, etc.

Second, people hold the required knowledge and expertise to handle complicated situations, which generally characterize disasters and major incidents. They can analyze beyond the developed plans and they can take decisions to manage and resolve the situation.

The third point is that continuity of people is not only required during disasters, but is a critical requirement for the post-disaster phase, where getting back to normal and stabilizing the organization can be an aggressive pressure on human resources and people availability.

For all these reasons, and more, planning is necessary for the protection, well-being, safety, good morale, and maintenance of people relevant to the organization. This requirement, as mentioned above, is supported by laws, regulations, and ethics. Along with the local health and safety laws and acts, there is a global consensus on the right of employees to be protected against risks and dangers associated with their work and work environment. The organization is the one party responsible for providing a safe and protected work environment. This is not exclusive to employees; legal requirements require the provision of minimum levels of safety and protection for non-employees, visitors, customers, and the general public. The US Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act mandates organizations to provide workplaces that are protected and free from serious hazards and threats to safety and well-being. In the UK, the Health and Safety at Work Act defines the major role for employers to play in providing environments that are safe from threats to health and safety to employees and other people in the workplace.

There’s also an ethical driver for planning for people in BCM. Let’s consider an example of a wide-scale natural disaster. The organization cannot simply expect an employee to perform recovery tasks if he/she is worried or concerned about the health and well-being of family, relatives, or friends. It is also doubtful whether even the BCM managers would be there if their families, or even friends, needed them in such circumstances. This is normal human nature and this issue needs to be considered when the BCM program is being devised and implemented.

The goals of planning for people in BCM are:

• minimizing of risks and threats facing people relevant to the organization;
• ensuring the availability of human resources required for the organization’s recovery process;
• minimizing the different types of impacts from disasters on people and on the organization.

There are different strategies for achieving these goals that will be discussed in the following sections.

The importance of people

Organizations are established to achieve certain goals and fulfill specific visions. The most important enabler for the achievement of such goals and visions is people. Using the word people rather than staff or employees is intentional. In the wider circle of interest being considered, people refer to all humans in relation to the organization. Staff, employees, their families and connections, clients, customers, the local community, etc. all fall under the definition of people.

The reason why they are included within the circle of interest is because they have an almost direct effect on the traditional definition of people that the BCM professional tends to use: staff and employees.

When families of employees are affected during an incident or an event, the normal response from the employee concerned is to be there for them. The organization should understand that for employees, it’s only a job while family, on the other hand, is their whole life. The developed plans should consider that fact in order to be successful.

When clients and customers and the local community are affected by major incidents, it is most likely that the organization will be affected. The area concerned may not be large but it does help to consider scenarios where there are effects on local communities and certain clients and customers from possible incidents. For example, the organization may consider alternative channels to deliver its services to its clients. It may also choose to keep the local community informed on the incident and progress made to recover from its effects.

In Chapter 2, some of the threats and risks relevant to people are mentioned. However, a threat and risk list is not generic and is almost unique for every organization. Most of the risks will result in the non-availability of staff or employees during recovery phases and, therefore, the organization will be affected. What the organization should be doing is to include, as far as possible, the larger circles of people in their continuity plans in a way that alleviates the effects of disasters on them and enables employees to be available during recovery phases. Showing that the organization cares for families and communities would help significantly in increasing the loyalty of employees and enhances its reputation among the relevant parties. Both factors significantly reduce the impacts of major disasters on any organization. Next, we will discuss the actions that the organization can take to take care of families and local communities.

Caring for the families

This is the circle that has the most significant and direct effect on the organization’s workforce. Caring for the families starts well before any disaster. It actually starts as early as the time the employee joins the organization. Proper health care insurance and coverage as well as having emergency funds at the disposal of affected employees and their families are among the services that can be provided for employees and their families. The organization can also plan for successors effectively to enable employees to spend more time with their families and attend to their needs. In some organizations, there might be the possibility of relocating the families to safer locations or extending medical coverage offered to cover any medical needs. Organizations can also provide emotional counselors to manage any shock, trauma, stress, and tension that may result from disasters and help people to cope. In addition, organizations can help families with practical services, like electricians and carpenters, to reduce the impacts of disasters on them.

Overall, organizations can perform many actions that are focused on the families of their employees which can result in immediate and positive reactions from the workforce towards the organization.

Caring for the local communities

Local communities play a major role in the success or failure of organizations under normal conditions and during disasters. For some organizations, local communities provide most of the workforce and a considerable proportion of their customers and clients. Local communities contribute to public opinion, which affects the reputation of the organization.

The organization has a responsibility to contribute to the local community it operates in through social responsibility programs. When disaster affects the organization and the wider circle of the local community, the organization can help with alleviating the impacts of the disaster in different ways such as financial aid, help with equipment and resources, contributing with a workforce, etc.

The responsibility becomes bigger if the organization caused the incident or event. In all cases, the organization should keep the local community updated on the progress being made and with information relevant to the incident or event.

The organization should understand that they have to work together with the local community at all times to build a good reputation, which they will need that when disasters happen. Working together helps to minimize the overall impact of disasters on organizations and local communities. In the end, everyone will be a winner.

Succession planning

Succession planning is a common strategy to plan for the continuity of human resources. It is mostly concerned with employees but it can also be useful in freeing up employees that are needed by family, relatives, or friends.

The idea of succession planning is to create a sufficiently large number of employees who are capable of handling the tasks required. Capable means that they possess similar expertise and share relatively common knowledge. It sounds simple but in reality it is not an easy result to achieve. It requires cooperation from employees, strict implementation, and a management that is ready to show their teeth for non-compliant employees.

The most annoying, yet common, difficulty is resistance. Succession planning is often resisted by employees who are required to share their knowledge and experience with their colleagues. They sometimes fear that they will lose any superiority they might have enjoyed because they possessed critical knowledge and expertise in their area. In this situation, the management should demonstrate the need for it and the benefits for all parties from having proper succession planning. If resistance continues, stronger actions may be required. The management may opt to force objectives related to achieving proper succession planning within departments or areas into managers’ annual appraisals and evaluations. If they fail to make it happen, their evaluations and appraisals will be negatively affected.

Knowledge accumulated by certain employees and not shared among the others who need it is indeed a threat to the organization and its ability to perform its activities and operations. The organization becomes at risk from the unavailability of critical knowledge and expertise when it is needed. This lack of availability may be unintentional, as in the cases of staff travel or death. Nevertheless, it can also be a choice from employees who are unwilling to give the organization the benefit of the knowledge they have. They may be twisting the organization’s arm to get certain demands met or they may simply have bad intentions towards the organization and want to harm it.

There are some common techniques for performing succession planning. These techniques may work collectively or separately, depending on their applicability in the organization’s environment:

• knowledge documentation and creation of knowledge bases
• job rotation
• shadow backups
• distribution of critical processes over a larger number of people
• training
• outsourcing.

Knowledge documentation and creation of knowledge bases

Knowledge documentation is one of the common basic methods used to get knowledge out of employees’ heads and into other formats that are easier to share with others. Basic need not mean ineffective. It’s highly measurable and can be implemented indirectly and without huge resistance.

The first thing to do is to define what the knowledge is and the expertise that needs to be documented and shared. BIA is the answer to this issue. Once the required knowledge and expertise are defined, the organization should define the format that will hold and store the information. Automation can help here. For example, a lot of IT service management solutions and knowledge management systems are being created and enhanced to accommodate such information and expertise. They also come with a generic set of management frameworks and processes to support their work.

There are different ways to start getting the knowledge documented. Documentation of processes, procedures, and flowcharts is a good method and forms a baseline for what is being done practically and operationally. The drawback of this method is that it could be useless unless it is audited by peer expertise for adequacy and completeness of the information contained.

Another way is to create team or group action logs. This is most useful in projects and complicated assignments where teams are working together. The action logs contain all the activities done at certain time for handling specific issues and will create a good repository of references in similar situations. Unfortunately, this method requires additional resources to handle the creation, maintenance, and reporting of these logs.

Another common method is using automation to force employees tackling different tasks to perform a certain automated workflow that requires information all the way through. This is dependent on the nature of the software used as it may be complicated. Yet this method is the least resisted as staff are forced to use the software and they have to fill in information while using it.

All of the above are common methods but there are others. The organization can be creative about how to extract information and knowledge from employees. There is, however, one thing to consider when attempting this. The organization’s environment may be strict and formal and push the staff to be strict and formal. In this case, knowledge documentation and knowledge bases are easy to implement. There are other organization where the environment is open and, to a certain degree, informal. Staffs are creative and have unique responses in different situations. In such an environment, documentation and knowledge bases may not be the answer. The organization should consider and use other techniques.

Job rotation

Within many organizations, there are situations where there are a small number of employees doing a large number of tasks and the staff turnover is relatively high. Typical organizations in this situation are call centers. The organization is affected by losing staff who perform certain tasks that they have developed good experience in handling. Job rotation circulates staff within connected areas to develop experience and gain a certain amount of knowledge in relevant tasks. It effectively creates a pool of common and shared knowledge and experience to successfully handle different tasks within related areas. Expectations should be set properly; the purpose of job rotation is not to create talented and highly experienced staff. Rather it focuses on creating common skills and knowledge.

As a prerequisite to successfully implementing job rotation, the staff should be ready to change their tasks and job activities. They should also possess minimum levels of skill and background knowledge of the area as a whole and the individual sections included. The job rotation period should also be suitable. If the period is too short then the goal may not be achieved. If the period is too long then the staff may become bored and tasks become dull and uninteresting for them. If the requirement is to create sophisticated skills and expertise, job rotation may not be the answer.

Shadow backups

Shadow backups are employees working in one area that have some knowledge and experience about tasks being done in other areas. They may have obtained this knowledge and experience from previous employment or by any other method. They are linked with the original staff through proper communication channels so as to be informed of updates and developments. When the original staff are not available, they can substitute for them in performing their tasks. Their knowledge and experience may not be perfect but they can do the job.

Shadow backups are useful in areas that are geographically distant. For example, there may be a regional office with a limited staff count. They can use the head office to remotely manage the tasks or relocate backups to substitute for originals if they are not available for whatever reason.

The problem with shadow backups is that they are rarely successful if the backups are not familiar with the area or if the communication channels that keep the backups updated are not working properly. Yet it is still a good last resort to solve the problem of staff unavailability.

Distribution of critical processes over a larger number of people

Sometimes organizations are forced to reduce their staff size and concentrate their critical processes and information within the hands of a fewer number of employees. Or, there may be a monopoly on the execution of critical processes for political and cultural reasons. Regardless of the cause, the result is similar. The organization’s critical knowledge and experience are in the hands of a few employees. If these employees are not available, the organization may face a problem.

There is a common technique for solving this situation; the organization may choose to break a monopoly by relocating some of the processes to other areas or staff. The breakdown should be gradual and smart enough not to cause a great deal of resistance. The ultimate goal is to make sure that no one group has a monopoly on a significant portion of critical processes. The breakdown can come through organizational restructure or the introduction of new products or services that are equal in criticality to the existing critical processes.

The main issue with breaking down a monopoly is the political and cultural boundaries within the organization. Such boundaries are usually strong and tough to break. Top management should be tough in this situation. I know an organization where the CEO stepped in and asked staff to leave if they did not let go of their monopoly. They had two options: cooperate or leave. Eventually they cooperated.

Training

Training is a widely used methodology for creating a specific a level of knowledge about a specific area. As mentioned earlier, the main goal of succession planning for an organization is to ensure the continuous availability of qualified, experienced, and knowledgeable staff to perform critical operations. In that context, the organization should adopt a training program that supports, among other objectives, the main objective of succession planning.

Training can be delivered internally within the organization or externally through specialized training vendors. Regardless of the delivery method, the organization should identify its training needs by conducting a TNA against available skills and knowledge as well as the new developments and progress being made in the world related to the area concerned. BIA is on of the main sources for establishing the baseline of training needs.

Training should be scheduled and continuously measured to ensure proper delivery and adherence to its objectives. Employees still like to attend training courses thus it is the method that is resisted the least. The main drawback is that it requires continuous effort from the staff to keep themselves current and informed of developments. The organization should also continue in its commitment to train its employees. Failure to provide proper training for employees can put the organization under the threat of being out of date and cause the employees to become demoralized in affected areas.

Outsourcing

One of the solutions adopted is to get help from outsourcing providers and external contractors and consultants in the case of significant knowledge loss or the unavailability of employees. Outsourcing is becoming the preference for organizations of all sizes and for almost all sources of activity and operation.

With regards to succession planning, the organization should do a proper analysis and cost-benefit analysis of the outsourcing engagement. Outsourcing is easy as a concept but requires good management to get the benefits out of it. Outsourcing providers can also have disasters and these can easily propagate into the organization. By outsourcing the organization’s activities, the risk scope and types of threat get larger and more complex.