Plan for an Emergency

Every company—no matter how small—should have an emergency response plan. OSHA has wonderful templates and examples on how to create a plan. In this episode, Pandy stresses the minimum training every company should be doing to prepare for the unknown and unexpected emergency.

Transcript

Speaker: 0:21

Welcome. You're listening to the human resource. My name is Pandy Pridemore, and we're thrilled to have you here. I wanted to talk today about emergency response plans. Several years ago we did a show, actually, it was one of the very first we had done on a podcast about the importance of having an emergency response plan. And some of you jumped all over it and know the value and see the value. Others of you, I still hear the, "oh, we're too small. We don't have to worry about it." "Nothing ever happens here." But the dilemma is we're in a different world now. We're in a world that none of us are prepared for, and none of us really know what to expect from moment to moment. We're also seeing a lot of newer individuals coming into management and into authoritative positions. And with that said, we really need to make sure that everyone understands their role and what can happen when things go south, when things get off balance and no one's in control, and yet we need to be in control. And that's when an emergency occurs. So I have a list of things here I want you to really think hard about. And again, a couple weeks ago we talked about fourth quarter audits, and I probably should have wrapped the show around those several weeks, but actually it didn't come up till now, and I thought, yeah, I'm still going try to fit it in. It's not a bad thing to even work on in first quarter, especially with the bad weather coming. It's almost winter, and you're going to have closures. So whether you have a policy in your handbook or not, go back and discuss with senior leadership how do we want to communicate if we have to have a closure? And it doesn't matter what kind of closure. It's if it happens, how are we going to conduct this? How are we going to communicate? Are we going to pay it? Are we not going to pay it? Who do they call if they're not able to get in because of the roads? You know, these are all things that we talk about sometimes and think that we can handle them. And then when somebody does their own thing and it's different than what we would have expected, well, if we didn't give them the guidelines, if we don't have a policy by which for them to follow, what do you expect? So think about that. If we have to close the building, or if the roads are too bad and we're going to eventually have to close early, something of that order. Think about it.

Speaker: 3:09

I just had a company call me the other day and said, "we've got an electrical outage. What are we supposed to be doing? Are people supposed to be staying in the building? Are we supposed to find work for them?, you know, what exactly?" Because we depend on electricity. And and absolutely, almost every organization, unless it's mostly conducted outside, you depend on electricity. And if without computers, I mean, think about how dependent we are. But that's a company-by-company decision. You get to decide how you want to handle that. But if you could put a policy in place or at least some guidelines, so that whoever the lead or the senior member of management that's in the building when that outage occurs, they at least have a guideline to go by. I call this person first and then I called this person second. This is the department that is least needed in the building. This is the group of people I absolutely have to have, whether we have electricity or not. It's simple, but it gives the employees the comfort and the confidence that you know what you're doing and that we've got this already thought through. We're being proactive versus reactive.

Speaker: 4:28

What about fire drills? I just spoke to a group the other day. We had talked about it, I had asked them, "well, do you have an emergency response plan in place?" "Well, no, and we've been talking about it." I said, okay, well, let's just eat the elephant a bite at a time. When was the last time you did a fire drill? And the group looked around the table and went, that's been years ago. I said, okay, let's start there. Because if we had to talk about all the things that might require an evacuation, that might be more likely with what you people do and the type of equipment you have and and the manufacturing setting and such. So let's talk about a fire drill. How difficult would it be to put together a plan and execute one of those? And while you're at it, do we know what our alarm system would be, how we would notify the employees to evacuate and where will they evacuate? And it was wonderful. They put together a safety committee, they walked it through verbally, and then they did a fire drill and told me afterwards it went beautifully. But they learned that the place they had established as the gathering spot was not practical and that it probably would be where all the emergency equipment would be. So they actually learned something by doing the exercise. They also had to go and order new alert bullhorns, and then they just said, bullhorns aren't going to work, so we're going to do radios. It doesn't matter. The point is that they were actually working it through, talking it through. And the employees all said, "Wow, we have a plan." If it happens, I'm not going to be afraid because I know what to expect. I know who who's carrying the visitor's log out, who's going to be the last person to leave, who's going to be calling the fire department." This is huge for your employees. It was huge for them. So think about those.

Speaker: 6:29

Don't forget tornado drills. And I say that because we've got hurricanes here in the country. We have tornadoes. I mean, these are situations where, again, normally, a lot of times, it's in the middle of the day. And we have to be able to notify our employees if we're going to have an early dismissal, or we have to let them know where to go to shelter at that time. Simple. It's so simple. I bet if you and your senior staff got together and said, okay, where's the safest place in the building? How many, people can fit into there? Who's going notify the team? How long are we going stay in shelter? Do we need supplies there? You could have that entire tornado conversation completed in 45 minutes. If you can't do it in 45 minutes, you really do need to call me. I'm just going to say that.

Speaker: 7:27

How about Active Shooter? And again, I when I mention this to companies, they say, "oh, come on, what's the likelihood?" That's not the question to ask. The question is, who do I call to be the instructor? Because I hate to say it, but I've said it on the podcast. I know I've referenced this before. I brought in an active shooter trainer, and he had the class with a group, it was a salvage company. So we had almost 30 people in the room, mostly male, but we talked about okay, the office staff's going to do this, the people in the trucks are going to do this, the people in the distribution and the warehouse are going to do this. And it was not two weeks later. And the office manager got a call from law enforcement saying we have an active shooter in the loose running down the railroad tracks next to your building. Please lock down. I'm not kidding you. Two weeks, and that group did exactly what they were trained to do. They followed that training to a T. And it's amazing because they all they were so invigorated. They weren't upset that there was an active shooter. They weren't afraid that they were risking their lives or that they might be unsafe. They felt so empowered by the knowledge of what to do that they still mention it every so often. And who's to say it won't happen to you and your team?

Speaker: 9:03

Training is good. It's meant for proactive reasons. It is not meant to add chaos, it's not meant to suck up more of the time, what little time you guys have. It's to prepare yourselves for the unknown. And right now, life's offering us lots of unknowns. My last suggestion is do you have a plan for a medical emergency? And the reason I say this is so many times, I will get a call from a company and they'll say, "Yeah, we had somebody drop on the on the floor and they're an epileptic. We didn't know that they had epilepsy, and we just we didn't know what to do." Diabetics will do the same thing to you guys. In fact, many times if somebody's on a diabetic, what I call meltdown, those individuals will resemble somebody who might be on drugs. And you have to know what to do. You need to have a list. Each of you should have a list of emergency contacts for not only the employee, but also who do we call? What is the the number beyond 911? Is there another facility? Or is there an individual within the building that needs to be called, who's trained on the defibulator, who's trained for first aid, who's trained for CPR, all that should be established. Every bit of that doesn't have to be in a manual for emergency response, but if you had that list of your individuals to call or the individuals to reach out for help next to the first aid kit, think what that time saving would do for the life of an individual who might be at risk.

Speaker: 10:47

Look, these are not difficult things to do. And if you go onto OSHA's website, you're going to find all sorts of forms and documents and and it's templates to help you put together a very formal emergency response plan, which all of you need. I don't care if you have five employees or five hundred. Emergencies occur and it does involve not only your employees, but can they so affect your customers? Your vendors, maybe even family members. So be prepared. Understand that there are guidance around this, and it's not to threaten, but it could save your lives.

Speaker: 11:37

Take care and come back right here at the human resource.