Disaster can strike at any time. Always unexpected, it can come in the form of a natural disaster, such as an extreme weather event, or it can be damage caused by humans or animals, either wilfully or accidentally. Whatever the reason, it’s important to be prepared. The impact on your business can be catastrophic, but the more prepared you are, the better the chances of recovery.

The most effective way of preparing your business for a disaster event is by developing a business continuity plan, which sets out all the processes and procedures that will be undertaken if disaster strikes. Putting a plan in place would enable you to approach the situation calmly and, hopefully, get the business back on its feet much faster.

But where do you start? Creating a plan can be seen as a daunting task but if you break it down into smaller steps it may feel more manageable.

Step 1: Appoint a business disaster team or main contact

The first step in creating a business continuity plan is to get buy in from the senior team – it’s likely that it would be this group of people who would form the business disaster team if a disaster event occurred. They would need to provide the necessary direction and leadership so it’s important they are fully onboard and understand the role they would play. Within this group, someone must take ownership of the business continuity plan and lead the team, allocating roles and responsibilities according to skill sets.

Step 2: Undertake a risk assessment

It’s important to undertake a thorough risk assessment as this will identify where the weak points are. Identify the key business functions required to continue running the business. Understand the impact of various scenarios across all areas of the business. For example:

• IT and data. What would happen if you had an outage? Is all your key data backed up offsite? Do you have key contact lists for customers, employees and suppliers easily accessible?
• Office premises. Could the business function effectively if you couldn’t access your business premises for a period of time? Do you have an alternative building you can relocate to?
• Do your employees know who to contact if there is a disaster that impacts them? How easily can they adopt flexible working? What is your back to work procedure?
• Loss of equipment. What impact would various items of equipment have on the smooth running of your business? How easily can you replace equipment? Is your business reliant on email communications?
• Does your business rely on a website to drive sales or contacts? What would happen if your site went down or you didn’t have IT resources to deal with online requests/sales?

As part of your risk assessment you should conduct a business impact analysis. This will identify the impact across the business if a disaster occurred. You should look at all aspects of the business, from financial to operational, considering any time sensitivities. You should also draw up contingency plans.

Step 3: Create and document the business continuity plan

The business continuity plan should look at the 3 stages of a disaster.

During the emergency:

The plan will define the procedures for an emergency. Set out what you should do immediately after a disaster occurring. Clearly, the safety of your employees should be paramount. Once you know everyone is safe, the security of your business assets is your next priority.

Crisis management:

Make sure you take in to account all aspects of crisis management. The decisions you take while the disaster is ongoing and in the immediate aftermath will be critical. Covering off every eventuality in the plan should help you pre-plan these decisions as far as possible, ensuring they are the right ones and don’t have to be unpicked at a later stage.

Business recovery:

This is the final stage and covers the longer term aspects of restoring critical services and resources to get the business back on its feet at a basic level.

Step 4: Test and implement the business continuity plan

Implementation and training:

Once the plan is ready it should be distributed to employees, who need to know where the plan is stored and how to access it. There should also be clear instructions on how to update it. The plan should not be seen as a finished document, but rather something that is continually being updated. Employees need to know who to contact in the event of a disaster and what their roles and responsibilities are.

Testing:

Just like fire drills, the business continuity plan should be put to the test regularly so that everyone is familiar with the procedure, this is particularly important in larger organisations. It’s important they all know what to do in the event of a crisis so that everything runs to plan and business recovery can get underway as quickly and smoothly as possible. Testing the plan will also uncover any flaws and enable you to fix these, rather than uncovering problems during a disaster.