An Emergency Plan in Your Pocket

Emergency Planners and Managers work hard to design emergency response plans to best serve their organizations. The work can drag on and they often need more time to make sure that they do a great job and include everything. Unfortunately, time and money alone do not guarantee good planning or plans that work. Here’s a novel way to create a tiny plan that has been proven to save lives in actual emergencies.

By Guy Robertson

Guy Robertson is a senior planner at TMC and an instructor at the Justice Institute of BC and Langara College. He has written five books and numerous articles on corporate security and disaster planning, and offered workshops and lectures at conferences across North America and in the UK.

The Big Plan

Conscientious Emergency Planners tend to develop large plans of over

1. pages. These plans have many good points - they are comprehensive, they comply with the ISO 22320 standard and they would be useful if everyone understood the contents. Unfortunately, these plans usually don’t help ordinary staff as many organizations have no culture of preparedness. The binders sit on a shelf, unused and largely forgotten.

Preparedness Culture

Some of our clients create emergency preparedness programs where every employee is trained on the importance of preparedness and business resumption. In these cases, the employees are given a miniature emergency plan to keep in their pocket or to store on their phone.

Design

The best plans have the following features:

• Brevity
• Clarity
• Readability
• Attractiveness of design and layout
• Ease of updating and revision
• Appropriate for a particular staff: recognizing physical capabilities and experience in responding to potentially unsafe or dangerous circumstances
• Appropriateness for the particular organization’s culture
• Site specificity: addressing the organization’s risks at a specific site or sites

Paper response plans should have a small amount of space available for user customization, including the locations of safe gathering sites and emergency communication details. In some instances, brochure users might scribble additional information—for example, family telephone numbers and addresses—in margins. This kind of personal customization is usually acceptable. Paper plans should be produced on thicker and more durable stock, since they will suffer wear-and- tear over time, especially if people are reviewing them frequently.

Use

In many organizations, new employees receive the brochure during their first day on the job, along with an invitation to the next emergency response orientation session. The brochure contains basic safety orientation and emergency response basics. They are later used as part of business continuity training and later still, as instructions to follow during a disaster.

Security Caveat

Brochures must be carefully protected, especially if they include confidential corporate information.

If you’d like to comment on this article or explore these ideas further, contact me at guy.