Business continuity planning: Is your company ready to weather the storm?

August 8, 2008

By Ronnie Bragen, NPDP, Ceridian product manager

On February 5, 2008, residents in five southern states withstood a cluster of tornados that ripped through their region. The result was more than a billion dollars in damage and major disruptions in many of the region's businesses. Does your company have a plan for navigating the next big storm?

A business continuity plan describes an organization's preparedness for future incidents that could jeopardize the organization's core mission and its long-term health. Incidents can be local, regional or national and can include everything from office fires to earthquakes to pandemic illnesses to long-term power outages. In spite of the extreme nature of these potential incidents, business continuity planning is not the same thing as disaster planning. Disaster recovery is the process by which you resume business after a disruptive event. Business continuity planning is a more comprehensive approach to ensure your organization can maintain its healthy operations and positive revenue stream. Business continuity planning often is referred to using the more comprehensive phrase business continuity/disaster recovery plan (BC/DR).

BC/DR plan basics
At its most fundamental, a BC/DR plan should answer four key questions.

1. How will employees maintain open lines of communication?
2. Where will employees go if the disruption involves an inability to use the existing office space?
3. Fundamentally, how will employees be able to keep doing their jobs?
4. How will the company's employees continue to be paid on a regular basis, with no interruptions?

Perhaps the most important of these is communication. How will employees be able to continue to communicate with each other, management and the organization's clients and customers?

Making the case for a BC/DR plan
If your organization does not already have a BC/DR, you may need to make the case for its creation. For starters, consider your organization's regulatory requirement. In many instances, state and/or federal requirements dictate the need for a BC/DR plan. Healthcare, financial services and the insurance industry are examples of businesses that have fairly specific BC/DR plan requirements, though they may use different terminology to refer to them.

Tie the BC/DR plan to your organization's bottom line. The obvious question to ask is what happens to the company in the wake of a major business disruption? Most pointedly, what happens to the organization's cash flow? What happens to its customers? And what happens if the ability to provide those clients with your product or service is disrupted?

If your organization is large, it may make sense to meet with different business units to build support for your plan. Different businesses within the same organization may be affected differently. Some may have more reasons to need a BC/DR plan than others and may be better lobbyists for the creation of a plan.

Two key points to keep in mind during the early stages of creating your BC/DR plan are the organization's culture and flexibility. Business continuity plans mean different things to different people. The nature of your organization's plan will depend in large part on how your company is organized and on its culture. Understanding that culture, and being flexible about what your plan covers and how it is organized, can be crucial to the BC/DR plan success.

What should your plan cover?
The BC/DR plan should address several basic points, all designed to explain how your organization will continue operating in the event of an unexpected disruption. The plan should cover:

• Leadership succession
• Key personnel succession
• Off-site meeting place for top executives
• A plan for communicating with employees, customers and the outside world
• Alternative means of communication in the event phone networks are disabled
• Identification of local emergency response teams
• Realistic emergency exercises for all employees designed to provide insight into employee emotions and reactions
• A schedule for regular tests of the BC/DR plan
• Evaluation of exercise performance and the ability to improve the process

One of the most important parts of your plan is the need for regular, complete and thorough test exercises. By participating in business disruption simulations, employees are in an excellent position to identify potential plan problems and propose solutions to those problems. Also, practicing what happens in case of an emergency is instructive for employees, who are less likely to panic in the event of a major business disruption.

Loss of key personnel
If the organization's existing leadership is incapacitated, the plan needs to identify who will continue leading the business. Key personnel and their job functions can be just as important as its leadership. Consider, for instance, the payroll manager and the task of paying employees. In the event your company's key payroll people and/or their systems are disabled, what will be required to meet your compensation responsibilities?

Often, BC/DR plans can drive new ways of doing business. For instance, some of the solutions required to maintain business continuity can be addressed by using new processes or services that are largely disruption proof. Paying employees using a Web-based HR/payroll solution allows payroll management to be performed from any location with an Internet connection. Employee self-service facilitates fast information dissemination to all employees. Paying employees with paycards, cash cards or other paperless solutions means employees can be paid from anywhere. And if the unthinkable happens, critical crisis assistance can be provided via your employee assistance program (EAP) provider.

What about your key vendors?
Creating your own BC/DR plan could be crucial to the survival of your organization. But it can be equally important to know your organization's partners have business continuity plans. Ask your key vendors for copies of their plan. Typical key vendors include:

• HR/payroll/tax
• Benefits (your employees may need immediate healthcare)
• Employee assistance programs/work-life (for stress care)
• Information technology (including data warehouses)
• Accounts payable/receivables
• Banks

When the unexpected happens and the normal operation of your organization's business is disrupted, a BC/DR plan can be the difference between thriving and just surviving. Contact your Ceridian representative to learn more about Ceridian's Health & Productivity Services and related services.

Sources:
Chief Security Officer. "Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning: The Basics." - http://www.csoonline.com/article/204450/
Business_Continuity_and_Disaster_Recovery_Planning_The_Basics.
Walsh, Katherine. "5 Ways to Build a Business Case for Business Continuity." Chief Security Officer. 20 Mar. 2008 - http://www.csoonline.com/article/221615/
_Ways_to_Build_a_Business_Case_for_Business_Continuity?contentId=221615&slug=&.

Ronnie Bragen, NPDP, Ceridian Product Manager
Ronnie Bragen has 16 years of experience creating and implementing strategies focused on growth and new value creation of EAP, health and wellness and absence management programs. Currently, Bragen is product manager for Ceridian's absence and productivity management solutions, a set of services that helps organizations increase revenue and employee satisfaction and reduce the costs associated with absenteeism, presenteeism and liability/risk management.

Bragen has a bachelor's degree in Business Administration and has earned a New Product Development Professional certification. She is also Pragmatic Marketing Certified and a Six Sigma Yellow Belt. Bragen has earned numerous awards for excellence at Ceridian and coauthored articles for the Employee Assistance Report, EAP Digest, and the Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health.