The ABCs of corporate resilience: This essential mindset can be accomplished without difficulty

Corporate resilience: the ability of an organization to survive adversity, to recover from hardships or emergencies, economic, natural or man made disasters, and to swiftly recapture its position, its market share in its industry. Apple did it; IBM did it; even GM is in the process of resurgence. Whether you own or manage a large portfolio of properties or just a few, your operation needs to be resilient in order to recover from any crisis or emergency. The concept of corporate resilience is an outgrowth of the more common principles and practices we have been referring to as business continuity, risk management, emergency planning and disaster recovery. Corporate resilience is an essential mindset and can be accomplished without difficulty. All real estate administrators, building owners and managers must anticipate an emergency or disaster of any proportions. Business emergencies can occur any place, anytime and come in a variety of forms. Your planning should be designed to enable you to quickly adapt to unexpected business disruptions or unanticipated market changes. As a property owner or manager, you are undoubtedly aware of the long-term serious impact of a business interruption, and the related high costs associated with "down times." When a crisis occurs it is imperative that you have a written, tested business continuity plan; a business plan that has been reviewed, if not prepared, by business continuity specialists. These specialists analyze every aspect of your business to assure that your business systems and processes can continue to operate with minimum downtime and with minimum loss of revenue. What you must have is a timely and effective recovery plan in order to maintain client confidence, optimal efficiency and productivity and virtually seamless un-interruption. A viable corporate resilience plan has several essential ingredients. The plan must be a part of the corporation's governance doctrines. The plan should start with the establishment of a crisis management team who activates the formal, approved and tested business continuity and recovery plan in the event of an emergency or disaster. The plan should direct the establishment of an emergency command center, with a back-up command center location. The plan must have the provisions for worst-case scenarios such as when buildings are rendered inoperable. Are there redundant sites where back-up equipment, servers or mainframes, reside? Are nearby sites prepared to act as recovery sites where staff can operate out of with replacement workstations? Do employees have the accessibility to laptop computers and Fax machines for use at their residences and the ability to access company back-up data networks to maintain company operations and to stay in touch with management? Did the company make provisions for off-site storage of critical records and data, in particular, human resources records which will enable timely and efficient contact with employees. There are outside sources available to assist any property owner and manager with regard to the routine backing up of data through on-line vaulting. There are sources of hot and warm sites, sites that mirror your on-line data operations. There are mobile recovery services that will come to your geographical location and establish a temporary mobile data center within 24 hours. And there are computer equipment rental companies that can supply any equipment needs in 12 hours. In addition to dealing with the resilience and the continuity of business operations, the corporate resilience plan must include procedures to deal with safety of personnel, in specific, the evacuation of a facility, assigned responsibility and actions to be taken by personnel in the event of fire, explosion, flood, power outage or even civil unrest. It is imperative that your evacuation plans are site specific and have been reviewed by members of top management, human resources, security and facilities. It is highly recommended that you use the services of a disaster planning consultant in this regard. In addition to the establishment of the corporate resilience plan, there must be an ongoing program of testing the plan with emergency or disaster simulations and drills on a periodic basis. Training of all staff personnel in the corporate resilience plan is essential to the survival, the continuance of business. Safeguards International, as a Corporate Resilience Planning provider, is prepared to assist all property owners and managers by performing the necessary business continuity assessments and risk/vulnerability analyses of your properties which will result in the preparation of "customized" corporate resilience plans necessary to assure minimum business interruption in times of need, but most importantly, the rapid resurgence to back-to-normal operations. Allan Schwartz, CPP is president and CEO of Safeguards International, Inc., Yonkers, N.Y.