Lockdown and Covid may seem like a distant memory, but if a lockdown situation happened again, how prepared would you be? Follow our top tips.
1. Assess your response to the first lockdown
During the first lockdown, how prepared were you, what contingency planning did you have in place and how quickly could you mobilise your teams from home? Did you find that there were obvious communication difficulties, connectivity problems for remote workers or a lack of access to office-based resources?
Were you able to sufficiently adapt your business to have an online presence that met the needs of your customers? For example, if you ran a restaurant, how quickly could you adapt to online ordering for takeaway customers?
2. Prioritise employee safety and wellbeing
Ensuring that your most vulnerable staff members are protected and able to work safely from home along with the ability to check on their wellbeing in a safe space is essential. If we learnt anything from the first lockdown it is that the mental health of the nation suffered and more support could have been offered.
As an employer you are in a position to be at the forefront of this by creating private channels through which to communicate with team members over a secure network that makes them feel valued and listened to when times are tough.
3. Ensure that your communications remain on point and unhindered.
This means making sure that everybody has access to the devices they need such as laptops, mobile data and VoIP, and good connectivity to communicate via telephone and across conferencing facilities unhindered by unreliable WiFI networks or remote geographies.
4. Have a contingency plan
Things go wrong, so ensuring that you have backups and access to cloud technology is really important. Plan for every eventuality and also have a plan in place for phasing your staff back in when the time comes, whether that be a mixture of remote and in-office working or bringing everybody in at once.
5. Protect your physical premises and assets.
Ensure that your main premises or offices are well protected with CCTV and ongoing monitoring, with a good and reliable security system that is responsive and able to communicate directly with the emergency services if required.
During lockdown this should also have a positive impact upon your business insurance, however, check with your insurance provider.
The above points are good advice for any business and do not only apply to lockdown situations. In the event of flooding, terrorist attack or any other emergency type of situation, how well prepared is your business, school, housing complex or retail outlet?
DM us for your free emergency preparedness consultation.
