How effective is your company’s Emergency Response Plan?

A South African newspaper called the Beeld this week featured front page footage including dramatic colour photos of the Seaboard Hotel fire in Durban, South Africa with a caption: “Hotel-Inferno: Helicopters win battle against time to save 80 from roof”. It also featured another section a day later about the panic of people in the building – see - http://www.news24.com/Beeld/Suid-Afrika/0,,3-975_2136981,00.html

I wonder how many organization’s employees actually saw this and wondered (or doubted) about their organisation’s readiness to deal with a life-safety situation. However this was not the only articles in that paper dealing with such situations. Two other articles caught my eye. One dealt with the fire at the Renault Dealer workshop in Roodepoort where four cars were damaged when a fire broke out and the other story dealt with the 18 months old child that was mauled by a Bengal Tiger. In this story the father lost his one finger when they came to close to the fence and the tiger managed to grab the child and pull her towards him.

What struck me was that the camp has adequate signage and has been declared safe by the authorities, AND that the camp is popular with some schools because of its reputation for safety. Unfortunately signage is no guarantee that people have read and understood the message. So few of us ever bother to read the instruction manual of an appliance that we buy; until it breaks.

The problem with many safety drives and emergency response and crisis management plans is that they tend to focus on physical safe situations. Interestingly accident statistics have shown that 2% of accidents can be referred to as “acts of god” meaning that it is outside our level of control, that 10% of accidents are caused by unsafe situations and 88% caused by unsafe behaviour.

Hence the inherent danger – Human Behaviour remains the key weak link in any plan.Often we plan without considering the intangibles that can make a difference such as adequate communication and consideration for human behavior. People do not always react as planned and we need to take this into account.

Events such as the Virginia Tech shootings and disturbances at schools across the USA and in South Africa (teachers killed at school, teachers participating in industrial action and pupil violence including scissor attacks) have also illustrated the role and importance of crisis management preplanning and communications in an emergency and have reiterated the critical need for heightened emergency preparedness and response at schools, businesses and universities throughout South Africa. 

But what is an Emergency? An emergency is any unplanned event that can cause deaths or significant injuries to employees, customers or the public; or that can shut down your business, disrupt operations, cause physical or environmental damage, or threaten the facility’s financial standing or reputation.

Emergency management is the process of preparing for, mitigating, responding to and recovering from an emergency. Emergency management is a dynamic process. Planning, though critical, is not the only component. Training, conducting drills, testing equipment and coordinating activities with the community are other important functions.

In Powerlines Number 65 dated August 2006  I wrote an article called "An Untested Emergency Response Plan is a Source of Reputation Risk – The link between Reputation & Emergency Response ". I also mentioned in it that I had teamed up with a company called Scott-Safe to design and write emergency response plans that are benchmarked and compliant. Few people contacted me. This got me thinking: Do people actually care? How do they know that the Emergency Response plan of the organisation is compliant and tested? If you then have not asked that question, you should.

Or perhaps, let me ask you something personal; do you have a fire extuinghshers at home? Do you have an Emergency Response plan for your own home? Recently a delegate told a group about how they woke up at 3. 22 a.m. to find their house completely covered in smoke. They had to crawl their way out and their whole house burned down.

So when last have you taken a good look at those signs on the wall that tell you what to do in an emergency? When last where you part of a drill and how did it go?

Or do you honestly still believe that it will never happen to me?

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Spreading the Reputation message throughout the Organisation

To reduce reputational risk throughout the organisation the message regarding reputation as an asset and risk will need to be addressed at three levels:

Organisation Level

The company needs to develop a clear and convincing need for managing reputation. The best way is to embody the company’s approach in a policy document and strategic plan that states clearly that the Board of Directors recognizes the tremendous value of intangibles and undertake to manage it strategically.

This policy must be followed up with executive support that is demonstrated through the commitment of time, personnel, money. The policy needs to be rolled out using communication efforts that is planned, channeled, and acted upon. At the same time tracking and feedback systems should be developed that can include media scanning (external)and closer working together of the PR, Risk and Internal Auditors department in a vehicle such as a Reputation Committee*. Reputation needs to be included in performance management initiatives.

Department Level

At Departmental level department heads should ensure that staff are informed, educated, train and supervised to foster and build the department and organization’s reputation. Department Heads need to make Reputation a meeting agenda item which means that progress and obstacles and perceptions will be discussed and acted upon.

By department heads factoring in stakeholder reputation every time decisions are made, reputation will move from being a strategic concept to something more real. Department Heads can for instance focus on the concept of the internal customer service and through that focus improve perceptions of their own departments by external and internal stakeholders.

Individual Level

To foster reputation throughout the organisation will require a balance between affective, behavioural, and cognitive learning. This will necessitate a three-pronged approach: fostering attitudes, developing and practising of skills, and promoting understanding of the concepts and models behind reputation and stakeholder focused thinking.

In short: you need staff to not just know about reputation but also to be able to act and think in a reputable manner. Employees should receive information, education, training and supervision in what personal and organisation reputation is, why it is so important and what they could do to contribute to it. By selling the personal benefits to employees, attitudes will be affected and will eventually manifest through increased attention and personal service. People will learn to weigh up their actions in the context of their own personal reputation; i.e. "If I do this, what will people say, and feel about me".

By using a multidisciplinary and multidimensional approach companies can go a long way to influence the value of its reputation and ultimately its share price.

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Who Listens?

Does your organization have a listening capability?

Years ago I heard the story of a young psychologist asking the skilled old-timer: "Sir, how do you manage to listen to everyone’s problems and not get affected by it?"

"Easy", the old man replied: " Who listens?"

Yesterday I was sitting in a coffee shop reading the morning newspaper when an article caught my eye. This article:"Denials fly in PPS row with former director" alludes that the Professional Provident Society had brushed off claims that it sought to gag its former financial director from discusiing financial irregulariries that arose when it changed its technology systems.

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/topstories.aspx?ID=BD4A489586

Apparently the storm arose after financial director Callie Masson resigned after seven years service with the company over "irregularities" he said he found as a result of the implementation of the new system.

Now I don’t know the company, but what really got my attention in this article was that the previous financial director suggested that a forensic audit be conducted as the "irregularities" amounted to some R25 million rand. This was rejected by the Board and in fact the matter was called a "data error provision".

Interesting the terminologies used by professionals and management teams around the world.Could you imagine going to your specialist physician and he gives an"unqualified opinion" about your state of health?

But what irked me is when I read another article in the same newspaper "Alleged malpractice at Avis may total 3 million euro".In this article it states that Avis had commissioned independent experts to conduct a full investigation into the alleged malpractice. In the case of the South African example it is stated that the matter is a "non-issue".

It may be a non-issue to management, but what message is being sent to stakeholders in this instance?

Seemingly there are many South African companies that do not understand fully how to manage and mitigate reputation risk. Allegations do not have to be true to be damaging for instance. In my case, it caught my eye even though I have had no dealings with the organization.

Why would a forensic audit be ignored? If an organization has nothing to hide it should open itself to public scrutiny. It is in the interest of transparency and disclosure standards. This article did not exactly engender my faith in the situation.

In fact if I was the Crisis Manager-on- Call to this organization, I would suggest that they need to prepare themselves for scrutiny. And, not just scrutiny of the issue, but scrutiny of all business practices.Scrutinyt not just by investigative journalists but also by the regulators.

When Nike first erred with their underaged child labour practices, they went about to set the matter straight. Even though it took them years they now invite members of the media to investigate their supply chain up-stream and down-stream, so that any member of the media can visibly see the standards that they now employ in working with suppliers.

So, now where does this leave the ex F.D? I wonder, but there are lessons for organizations in this issue. As an employee what mechanisms are there in place for me to communicate about concerns, hazards, and other working practices? What about my suggestions? Will you listen to me, or must I become a whistle-blower?

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Transferring Learning into an Organization

Today was the first day of one of my two-day workshops that I faciltate on Reputation Risk Management. Whilst preparing for Day 2 I started thinking about the processes that organizations adopt to ensure that learning from external events are transferred back into the organization.

I have often wondered about this. Many executives attend conferences, seminars and workshops. BUT, how do we as training instructors and facilitators ensure learning.Some organizations address this through a very evolved knowledge management process. It is crucial because training is an investment. If the learners apply back at work what they acquired during their learning, there will be a return on the investment. If they do not, then the training time was merely spent (and hence wasted) rather than invested.

Why would learners not apply at work what they were taught during their training?

Three sets of factors are operating and serving to help or hinder the transfer of learning from class to job: personal, instructional, and organizational. Let us look at some examples of each.

• Personal Factors – These include such things as motivation (Does learner want to be in class? Know it already … or believes so? Enjoys the work and the job?); ability (Does learner have the ability to learn?); attention (Can learner concentrate? Or are weightier matters interfering … sickness, a marriage breaking up, etc.?); relevance (Does learner see the course as relevant to the job and to personal needs?).

• Instructional Factors – These include such things as course design (Appropriateness of methods and media? Facilities and equipment? Length and objectives?); emphasis (Theory vs. practice? Knowledge vs. skills’Talking vs. doing?); instructor (Credibility? Effectiveness?); follow-up (Do trainers get feedback on learners’ performance after training? Are actions taken accordingly, on the trainee and on the course design?).

• Organizational Factors – These include such things as climate (Do the norms, culture, and expectations of fellow employees and managers support the new behaviors that were just learned?); time and timing (Does trainee have time to do things the way they were taught? Was opportunity to apply new learning fairly immediate or too delayed?); degree of fit (Do local procedures, forms, equipment agree with those taught to the learner?).

The first of these three factors is internal to the learner, and there is often little the instructor can do to influence the personal side other than attempt to screen the participants (i.e., by assessing their “Entering Behavior” prior to the course and then making every attempt to get the right faces in the right places at the right times).

The second and third factors are external to the learner. Instructors, course designers, and management share a responsibility for establishing a maintenance system”that will recognize and reinforce the desired behavior of learners as they attempt to apply at work what they learned in class".

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