Facility managers must be prepared for anything and to expect the unexpected. Whether it be a natural disaster, bomb threat, active shooter or a mass casualty incident, emergencies are difficult to predict. Even so, FM teams are responsible for limiting operational impact and ensuring organizational resilience when unexpected events occur. This unpredictability of exogenous events that can impact operations reinforces the importance for facility executives to be intimately aware of the potential hazards distinct to their environments and develop emergency response plans that address these vulnerabilities.

Responding to specific incidents or crisis situations can span everything from using a spill kit to restoring a work site following a toxic spill to assisting authorities during an active shooter event. An effective response requires a clear set of mission objectives, which could be minimizing casualties in the aftermath of an incident or a speedy restoration of services. The response must consider the context of the facility and other stakeholders that might factor into the response. For example, if a school is in the vicinity, the response might be different (e.g., school lockdown initiated) than if the facility were in a commercial area.

Emergency preparedness and response plans can help bridge the gap between anticipation and action by conducting a risk assessment. Risk assessment is the first step in planning for any hazard. Emergency management and business continuity professionals must catalog solutions to the potential problems that prevent their organizations from resuming normal operations after an external shock. In practice, this means adopting an all-hazards approach that helps FMs anticipate potential challenges, assess risks, address outcomes and provide the best response possible when necessary.

State of crisis: The evolving emergency landscape

A recent uptick in significant crisis events has made it clear that organizations cannot afford to ignore their impact on business operations. Climate-induced crises are becoming more common. Last year was one of the costliest and deadliest years for natural disasters, as scientists warn that cli-mate change could make extreme weather more common. Hurricanes are expected to get more powerful as the ocean heats, higher temperatures will bring on worse droughts and winter freezes could become more common. All of this makes an FM’s job even more unpredictable. Consider the development of a large atmospheric river in late 2021 that wreaked havoc on facilities across the Pacific Northwest regions of Canada and the U.S.

On Nov. 14, 2021, 24-hour rainfall in this area broke multiple records. Hope, British Columbia reported 6.8 inches of rain in one day. Meanwhile, in the state of Washington, the Nooksack River crested at 23.76 feet, causing damage to neighborhoods, businesses, and farmland forcing the evacuation of more than 500 people. While just a small sample size, imagine the roughly 36,000 facilities made inoperable in the U.S. if they were faced with these same floods. Clearly, FMs assume a high level of risk from floods alone.

This trend is unlikely to reverse course. It is expected that over the next 30 years, an additional 66,000 commercial properties, 6,100 pieces of social infrastructure, and 2,000 pieces of critical infrastructure will have flood risk that would render them inoperable. The U.K. reflects the same trend as the U.S. and Canada with nearly one in three commercial properties at risk of flooding. Experts and facility managers are acutely aware of the situation; almost 70 percent of subject matter experts surveyed by the MIT Sloan Management Review agreed or strongly agreed that their corporations are planning for the increased operational risks and potential liabilities caused by climate change. The ever-changing climate will continually develop new threats and exacerbate existing ones. FMs must become proactive in reducing the costs of natural disasters and climate-change-induced crises. To address this evolving emergency landscape, businesses are best served by developing robust and repeatable preparedness and response plans that help blunt initial impacts, contemplate and mitigate the consequences of the initial effects and set the stage for a speedy recovery.

Key aspects of an emergency preparedness & response plan

The initial actions taken in the face of an emergency are critical. Employees must be promptly advised on the appropriate course of action, whether to evacuate, shelter, or enter lockdown. A call for help to public emergency services that provide complete and accurate information will help partner organizations send the appropriate level and type of personnel and equipment.

The challenge? While the first few moments of an emergency are the most critical, they are also the most stressful, leaving the organization vulnerable to early missteps that can add undue challenges to meeting recovery objectives. Robust emergency preparedness and response plans can help FMs navigate initial cri-sis stages and make informed decisions. Three aspects of any facility’s emergency preparedness and response plan are critical, an all-hazards approach, a clear chain of responsibility and a repeatable process.

An all-hazards approach

Practitioners know that there are many different types of incidents. They also know that an all-hazards framework that takes a comprehensive approach to emergency preparedness and response works best. While this requires work upfront as a part of preparedness and planning, it sets organizations up for success by providing plans that cover the most contemplatable scenarios and provide components whose permutations can effectively respond to new circumstances. An effective all-hazards approach requires an understanding of the baseline risk, the sources of potential shocks, their likelihood and their potential impact.

Clear chains of responsibility

When emergencies happen, multiple stakeholders seek information and direction, causing crippling stress for an unprepared response team. To ensure an effective response, FM teams should have readily accessible and familiar templates that create clear chains of responsibility and action. This includes identifying information that must be shared, preassigning specific people and responsibilities, and locating where critical functions may ‘fall over’ if primary operational channels are no longer available. While these are unlikely to be perfect, they provide a vastly superior starting point as opposed to an ad-hoc response.

Repeatable process

To be effective, plans need to be trusted, familiar and practiced. The scenarios must be relatable — stakeholders investing their time in the planning process must be convinced that they are focusing on the most relevant issues; the plans must be repeatable — both by design and practice, ideally becoming a part of organizational muscle memory. This relatable and repeatable approach makes it more likely that procedures will be effectively followed, reducing risk while reducing the time it takes to resume normal operations.

Building a better emergency response plan

From routine issues to major crises, FMs and their teams can be confident that unexpected events will happen. These events may originate internally from unexpected failures or downtimes of machinery or software, internal or external persons acting in a manner that compromises the facility or natural disasters. Regardless of the origin, emergencies can pose a threat to a facility, its physical assets, and its occupants within minutes. This uncertainty makes an effective and practiced response plan mission critical. An effective response can reinforce the trust people place in the leadership and the brand; an ineffective one can cause significant long-term damage to the brand.

Building a better emergency response plan starts by identifying vital operational vulnerabilities, potential business impacts, and desired recovery time objectives (RTOs).

Each of these is critical for vulnerability assessments. Vulnerabilities may be location-dependent: a coastal facility is more likely to face a hurricane/typhoon than one in a landlocked desert, for example. By identifying areas of potential vulnerability before emergencies happen, businesses can create plans that specifically address these threats without trying to boil the proverbial ocean. Vulnerability assessments are not a siloed exercise; while the FM team can inform building users about what to expect, they need to work with a cross-functional team to understand business impact.

While assessing potential business impact, FMs must work with their organizations to answer three key questions:

  • What happens if a line of business is taken out because of a disaster?

  • What resources are required to trans-fer those operations elsewhere?

  • Who is responsible for this process?

Finally, creating a standardized and comprehensive way to achieve recovery time objectives is crucial. This means identifying ideal RTOs, the potential im-pact of not meeting these objectives, and the steps required to achieve RTOs in different circumstances. For example, while a flood that disrupts a local data center might require a failover to cloud services to meet RTO objectives, the situation changes if the cloud provider is also impacted by the emergency. As a result, FMs need plans capable of responding regardless of circumstance.

Testing, testing: the need for ongoing evaluation

Ongoing evaluation is critical for any emergency response and preparedness plan to succeed. While exercises may vary by organization, over time, they must comprise tabletop exercises, focused drills, or full-scale drills. Only when all stakeholders are involved will plans be tested.

However, no matter the approach, it is critical for organizations to test their tooling and ability to create a single source of truth for data required before, during and after an incident or event. They must create and maintain muscle memory for the organization to effectively use these tools — the best tools provide no value when left unused or used inappropriately. The right tools can provide this source of truth to improve coordination and collaboration. FMs should look for tools that provide after-action review and improvement plans and the ability to capture comments and create a document that lets you link back to critical areas for improvement.

Emergencies are naturally unpredictable. Organizations and their FM teams require processes and procedures to minimize damage to physical assets and save lives when an emergency occurs. Armed with all-hazards emergency preparedness and response plans, appropriate practice, evaluation and the right tooling, FMs will not only mitigate the impact of unexpected events and create sustainable frameworks for ongoing success but also develop a reputation of being able to respond seamlessly in the face of challenges.