BUSINESS CONTINUITY IN THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC CRISIS

While COVID-19 has significantly impacted our communities both locally and abroad, the Australian storage business community finds itself uniquely positioned as an essential service for both commercial and personal needs. By Marcus Vaughan Director, Growth Strategies – RiskLogic.

While business in this industry will change, the show must go on. To assist business leaders navigate their people and operations through these trying times, we’re going to walk through some of the key considerations to crisis management and business continuity.

ASSESSING IMPACTS

When any major event takes place that has the ability to significantly impact your organisation, a foundational starting point in crisis management is to undertake an impact assessment on both current and potential impacts. The key process here is to understand ‘How does this event have the potential to impact our organisation?’. Walking through this assessment, organisations should always consider a variety of impact categories such as people, operations, financial, reputation. By clarifying where the greatest impacts will be, you can begin to consider where you allocate your time and resources to execute strategies to reduce these impacts.

PANDEMIC MANAGEMENT

During COVID-19, the driving complexity that has hindered many plans is the execution of health and safety strategies for operating onsite for both employees, contractors and customers. The strategies employed to mitigate health concerns should reference Australian federal and state health guidelines. This will ensure that best practice is considered in the current environment. Social distancing measures, cleaning regimes and quarantine / isolation measures all need to be considered, aligned with health authority advice.

Tracking your actions during COVID-19 (facts, tasks and communications) is also an important factor. Many organisations are already finding a need to demonstrate to a variety of stakeholders what decisions were made, on what information, at what time. Crisis management tools such as CQ have been developed to simplify this process.

COMMUNICATING WITH YOUR STAKEHOLDERS

In crisis management, communication is everything. However one of the greatest undoing’s of many organisations in crisis communications is first considering

The organisations who both prepare to manage a disruption as well as position themselves to capitalise on the upswing will be valiant in the market.

your stakeholder map. Who are your stakeholders, and how will you communicate with them? Developing a stakeholder map is an essential step before communicating. Stakeholder groups will include your employees (very commonly forgotten in crisis communication strategies), your customers, the community, local or regional government agencies such as council, emergency and health services (where appropriate). Your message to each stakeholder group needs to be carefully considered so that it is empathetic, factual and relevant. Your mode of communication will also be important depending on the message and stakeholder you are sending it to (phone call, email, sms etc).

UNDERSTANDING AND PROTECTING YOUR CRITICAL FUNCTIONS

At the turn of 2020, Australia was rightfully consumed with the impacts of the devastating bushfires ravishing most of our nation. Now, our focus has turned to the impacts of COVID19. The reality is, as one major event unfolds, it does not eliminate the broader threat landscape that our organisations are exposed to. As such, it is critical for every organisation to understand the critical functions that our business needs to continue to perform. By undertaking a business impact analysis, we can identify what functions are truly critical, what resources (e.g. people, assets, utilities, applications, suppliers) we need to continue them and how long will it take before the loss of that function significantly impacts on our business. In identifying these functions, we can work towards building out contingency strategies to keep the most critical functions working, when a disruption occurs.

Keep in mind that we’re all very focussed on COVID-19 now, but what would happen if 80% of your system applications were knocked out due to a cyber-attack, this month? What functions would be disrupted and how would you continue to service your customers and look after your staff?

PREPARING FOR RECOVERY

As social distancing begins to lift and the Australian business economy begins to function as a new normal, you may very well see a surge on demand for your business. The organisations who both prepare to manage a disruption as well as position themselves to capitalise on the upswing will be valiant in the market. Working through strategies to capture and service this upswing should be considered before it arrives. Key questions to ask yourself as we move closer to recovery are ‘How would our business deal with a 30% - 50% demand increase in service?’ and ‘What business functions would be stretched during this time, and what resources would be required to meet this demand?’ l

If you need any resources or assistance with regards to crisis management or business continuity during COVID-19, please visit www.risklogic.com.au

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