A TEMPLATE FOR SITUATIONAL AWARENESS Standardized Crisis Response through the Incident Management System By Simone Skopek
PROPERTY AND FACILITY managers who face a natural, man-made or multicausal crisis have a duty to: 1) keep their staff and occupants safe; 2) protect the real estate assets they manage; and 3) resume business quickly. In organizations with large portfolios, there is the added challenge of managing centralized activities, including coordinating the emergency response throughout the organization and addressing the urgent needs in business areas such as human resources. For any large organization to manage a crisis, there are two fundamental requirements. First, there must be accurate and timely situational awareness regarding all the critical areas. This information must find its way up the chain of command to those in authority — i.e. senior management who need this information to make informed decisions. From there, the second fundamental requirement is that senior management 28 October 2020 | Canadian Property Management
relays clear directives to all workers in the field. The importance of situational awareness going up to the nerve centre of the organization and clear directives coming down and across the organization cannot be overemphasized. Unfortunately, “bottom-up meets topdown� communications can be confusing unless there are clear channels that do not cross one another, and which contain communications from the people who have the right information and the authority to act. For example, problems can arise if every employee is allowed to use their own best judgement to determine to whom they will distribute an e-mail. With a lot of information f lying around, people become overloaded. As they scramble to sort out exactly what is happening and who is doing what, situational awareness and directives may be confusing, even contradictory,
and/or important messages can be overlooked. The Incident Management System (IMS) is a universal system of communications to facilitate situational awareness and directives, which is used by emergency management professionals all over the world. It can be applied to almost any type of organization, including those that oversee large real estate portfolios. The globally accepted unified Incident Management System was developed out of the need for government and nongovernment resources to work together to tackle large-scale incidents. It arose in the early 1970s when devastating wildfires in southern California destroyed vast areas of forest, killed eight people and cost more than $18 million per day in total expenses and damage. Many services, both private and public at all levels of government, were involved in
