When a business crisis occurs, the last thing you want to do is panic.
The second-to-last thing you want to do is be unprepared. Crises typically arise without warning. While you shouldn't start every day expecting the worst, you should be relatively prepared for anything to happen.
A business crisis can cost your company a lot of money and ruin your reputation if you don't have a business continuity plan in place. Customers aren't very forgiving, especially when a crisis is influenced by accidents within the company or other preventable mistakes. If you want your company to be able to maintain its business continuity in the face of a crisis, then you'll need to come up with this type of plan to uphold its essential functions.
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Business continuity planning is the process of creating a plan to address a crisis. When writing out a business continuity plan, it's important to consider the variety of crises that could potentially affect the company and prepare a resolution for each.
A business continuity plan is important because regular operations will need to continue in the event of a crisis —and sometimes, especially during a crisis. Having a business continuity plan in case of each type of crisis will be helpful in maintaining your operations.
Business continuity management oversees a business's continuity plan and makes necessary changes to it when needed. This type of management determines the potential threats to a company and how each of these threats might impact business functions. Based on these findings, business continuity management is able to tweak the company's continuity plan to address any new potential hazards.
One responsibility that business continuity management teams have is planning for disaster recovery. Disaster recovery is a component of the business continuity plan that specifically focuses on product issues. In addition to that, business continuity management also includes crisis management, contingency planning, and emergency management.
You'll want to regularly test and adjust your plan as time goes on to make sure it's still effective and addresses your company's needs.
Next, we'll go over different types of business continuity that could impact your organization. These will set the foundation for the business continuity examples and templates we'll share later on.
Operational continuity means that the systems and processes your business relies on are able to continue functioning without disruption. As these processes are critical to business operations, it's important to have a plan in place in case disruption occurs so you can minimize the loss of revenue.
Organizations that rely on technology to run want to ensure the integrity and continuity of those systems. For example, while the functionality of Google Drive is not within your realm of control, there are many internal systems that you'll want to maintain and mitigate, like maybe having an offline file storage system to access important documents.
Economic continuity means that your business is still able to continue being profitable during possible disruptions. Every business has its ups and downs, so one thing you'll want to do is future-proof your organization for negative scenarios that can hit the bottom line.
Workforce continuity means that you'll always have enough staff, and the right staff, to handle the work that comes through your doors, especially during times of crisis.
Workforce continuity goes beyond planning the right roles and staffing the right people to fill them. In order for them to show up every day and perform well, they must feel safe to do so. This involves creating a comfortable work environment, and ensuring that, even during a crisis, people have the tools they need to succeed and feel supported in the workplace.
Environmental continuity means that your team is able to operate effectively and safely in their work environment. This can mean considering possible threats to your physical office or headquarters, and coming up with plans of action if these issues occur.
You want your employees to be safe. You also want your employees and business assets to be secure as well. Security breaches can cause major harm to your operations, safety, and reputation. Continuity in this realm means prioritizing employee security and safety of important business information, and plans of action if the information were to become compromised.
Customer satisfaction and a good reputation can fuel your flywheel and result in increased revenue. The flip side of this coin, however, is that a tarnished reputation can cause great harm.
Reputation continuity means continuously monitoring conversations about your brand or business, prioritizing customer satisfaction, and coming up with action plans for rectifying situations if your reputation is called into question.
The difference between disaster recovery and continuity plans lies in that disaster recovery plans are technical plans focused specifically on recovering from failures, while business continuity plans manage relationships during a crisis. Disaster recovery plans are created as part of an overarching business continuity plan.
For instance, in a larger crisis — like a building being flooded — you may have lost some of your IT services. Thus, included in the larger business continuity plan would be one or more disaster recovery instructions that would focus specifically on recovering those IT services.
Below we'll go over the process of writing a business continuity plan, starting with a free template you can use to follow along.
Name of Organization
1. [Purpose of the plan]
2. [Objectives of the plan]
The gathering process for this section could take anywhere from 1-2 weeks, as you'll want to take enough time to uncover all the necessary information that helps you understand why the plan is necessary for your business. It is essentially the background information for your plan.
Manage, plan for, and communicate during your corporate crises with these crisis management plan templates.
