In addition to the unique hazards associated with working from home, maintaining open lines of communication may prove to be a considerable challenge for your company. However, it doesn’t have to be. Part 2 of our at Home Hazard Assessment Guide is designed to help you and your people stay in touch to mitigate the risks associated with working from home in your respective industry. This segment will cover communication tactics that should be carried out in the event of an emergency.
BONUS: Download our flexible worksheet to develop an efficient and effective communications plan for your organization if or when an emergency takes place:
Develop an Emergency Communication Plan
How Will You Communicate With Your Team When an Emergency Strikes?
Contact managers about the emergency situation.
If an emergency has occurred, it is crucial that other members of your organization are aware of what is happening. Management should be immediately notified with details pertaining to the current situation so they can act accordingly. If the emergency is serious or life-threatening, employees should call 9-1-1 before contacting managers.
Send staff-wide email explaining situation.
Your employees need to know what is happening in your organization in real-time in order to make informed decisions about what to do next. Depending on the context and severity of the emergency, staff will only be able to aid or help the situation if they know exactly what is going on. It is also important for employees to know why a particular co-worker is unavailable, missed a meeting, or not returning calls. If you workforce is remote, your staff can become very isolated if they are not kept up to date on the activities of their co-workers and on events that have impacted the company.
Post emergency information on internal intranet.
Transparency and open lines of communication are particularly important for a remote workforce. This means keeping your staff up to date on important events and current happenings that may impact them. If an emergency has occurred and one of your staff has been negatively impacted, the rest of your workforce should know. Thorough knowledge of events leading up to an accident can provide an improved awareness of factors that may have caused the accident, which enables your organization to learn from past mistakes and take steps to prevent similar events from occurring in the future.
Employ safety check-in system.
If your organization does not already use a form of check-in procedure, now is the time to implement one. A check-in procedure is an effective way to confirm the safety of your staff throughout the workday. Choose predetermined time intervals at which employees will check-in during their shift. If an employee misses a check-in, monitors will know that something may be wrong and will be able to act instantly. Implementing a check-in procedure streamlines the emergency response process, because it removes the need for an employee to contact managers if there is an emergency. The rapid response that having a check-in system allows is invaluable, especially for a remote work force, because it minimizes the amount of time that passes after an emergency or accident has happened.
Scatterling allows you to customize the amount of time between each required check-in. If employees know that they will be in a more dangerous environment than usual, they can shorten their check-in intervals in order to confirm their safety more frequently.
Bonus: Develop an Emergency Communication Plan
Once you have determined your tactics, you need a plan to implement them. This is where a thought-out communications plan is crucial. Employees must be aware and educated on what to do if there is an emergency or accident within their organization – this is especially true for companies who employ remote or lone workers. As a majority of companies across the United States have implemented mandatory work-from-home policies, having a clear and proactive emergency communication plan is more important than ever.
Here is a flexible worksheet to develop an efficient and effective communications plan for your organization if or when an emergency takes place: