Organizational resilience: Can you survive and recover in the face of adversity?

Economic uncertainty, instability and business discontinuities mandate aggressive management action to ensure that businesses have the organizational agility and organizational resilience to withstand major events and risks. The resilient business operation should be built on principles of organizational empowerment, principles, conviction and responsibility. Resilience is a defensive business strategy enabling the business to recover quickly from sudden unforeseen events. The resilient enterprise must be prepared to optimize workforce effort and leverage individual contribution. Yet many businesses continue to rely on traditional practices that may weaken or become less responsive under adversity. Organizational resilience is an enterprise's capability to respond rapidly to unexpected change, even chaotic business interruption. It requires toughness, preparedness and flexibility, the key elements to give us the ability to rebound with swiftness, poise, resolve and meticulousness. These are the attributes that all corporate administrators, building owners and property managers must demonstrate when anticipating an emergency or disaster of any proportions. As a property owner or facility 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 of business. To be "resilient," you must have a viable business continuity and recovery plan with the following 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 continuity of business operations, the business continuity 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 business continuity and recovery 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 business continuity consultant in this regard, not only to assist in the preparation of these plans as necessary, but also to perform independent audits of these plans on a regular basis once they have been established. In addition to the establishment of the business continuity and recovery plans, there must also be an on-going program of testing the plan with emergency or disaster simulations and drills on a periodic basis. Once adopting these strategies, you will become more resilient. Safeguards International, as a business continuity 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" business continuity and recovery plans necessary to assure minimum business interruption in times of need. For your assured organizational resilience, put the continuance of your business in Safeguards International's hands. Allan Schwartz, CPP is president and CEO of Safeguards International, Inc., Yonkers, N.Y.