A newly published report from the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) highlights a number of trends in the implementation of emergency communications plans in the UK. In order to be effective, emergency communications plans must be continuously updated to reflect the risks that a business faces, and must be thoroughly embedded throughout the organisation.
The BCI says relevant training and education programmes, as well as ensuring top management buy in, are necessary in promoting a culture of awareness and reducing the risk of communications failure during incidents.
Emergency communications: further findings
•In a sign of growing awareness, almost 90% of organisations have an emergency communications plan.
•Emergency communications plans are quite comprehensive in their scope. At least 70% of organisations have plans covering the following threats: IT outages (81%), fire (78%), power outages (76%), weather related incidents (75%), natural disasters (75%) and security related incidents (70%). These mirror the top three causes of business disruption as reported by respondents in the last 12 months: IT outages (60%), power outages (52%) and weather related incidents (47%).
•Almost a fifth of respondents belong to organisations where more than 500 staff members travel internationally on a regular basis. More than a third report travelling to ‘high-risk’ countries.
•Almost two-thirds of companies report having training and education programmes in place related to emergency communications. The same number have regularly scheduled programmes .
•Around 15% of organisations regularly schedule exercises of their emergency communications plans. Some 56% schedule their exercises once a year. This is a worrying finding considering that almost half of organisations are likely to invoke their plans more than once during any given year
•More than 70% of organisations take 30 minutes or less to activate their emergency communications plans. Nonetheless, more than a quarter of organisations do not request responses from their staff in the event of an incident or have defined acceptable response rates.
•Social media appears to play an important role in an emergency communications plan. Some 42% of respondents report using social media to monitor their staff during emergencies and almost a third use it to inform stakeholders.
Download CIR's latest guide to Emergency & Mass Notification Software, published November 2014.
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