Pandemic Planning & COVID-19 Contingency Planning
Any form of public health emergency, epidemic or pandemic creates huge uncertainties for entire communities affecting both personal and work life. Dealing with the unpredictability of disease waves, understanding the implications of timescales, lockdowns, increased hygiene and response measures that are adopted locally, nationally and globally is incredibly disruptive and stressful.
When the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, named by the World Health Organisation as COVID-19, emerged at the end of 2019, few predicted the dramatic restrictions that would be imposed by governments around the world in March 2020, and the impact these would have on how we go about our day-to-day lives. Organisations, large and small, have experienced variations of operational mode since then.
The world has moved through a number of phases including a limited return to the workplace, education and some social activities, amid the prospect of tighter restrictions over the winter months. Much work has been done by employers to ensure premises are COVID secure in accordance with government guidance.
Traditionally, pandemic business continuity planning has focused on the impacts of a widespread disease that causes the unavailability of a significant number of the workforce. As we have seen, the impacts can be much wider as workplaces and transport become no-go areas requiring an immediate shift to working from home strategies.
Teed continues to work with clients throughout every phase of the pandemic incorporating lessons learned so far, new business practices, changed business models and for some a changed workforce. The principals of business continuity planning still apply:
- Analysis of the organisation’s critical activities
- Identifying what resources are required to undertake those activities
- Determining the timescales within which they need to be delivered
- Developing and implementing appropriate strategies
- Documenting a business continuity plan
- Exercising and testing to validate the plan and strategies
Teed’s consultants are working closely with clients to identify the appropriate measures needed to respond to further iterations of the pandemic. It is important to factor this into preparing for other resource loss scenarios, whether people or premises unavailability, loss of IT and equipment, key suppliers, or a combination.
Forethought, scenario planning, prompt decision making and effective communication with stakeholders can help maintain business continuity, safeguard jobs, market share and reputation. Reacting to trigger events and materialising risks is much easier when you already have your response, recovery and resumption route mapped out.
How can Teed help?
Our consultants are experienced practitioners who make the best use of time and budgets available to ensure clients receive quality deliverables that work in practice. Using our proven methods, we facilitate discussions with relevant business representatives to determine a plan of action.
Pandemic planning is best factored into the bigger picture encompassing business continuity, IT disaster recovery and cyber security planning and incident management so that all disciplines are working in tandem.
Projects can also be focused on discrete elements, for example, undertaking a preparedness gap analysis, auditing COVID secure practices and procedures or designing and facilitating pandemic-related exercises.
Planning provides confidence to everyone involved with the organisation that a proportionate response can be delivered.
Teed’s skilled consultants will help make the journey as simple and cost-effective as possible to achieve your planning objectives.
In addition, we have developed a COVID-19 Business Continuity Review package for organisations wishing to understand how they can benefit from lessons learned during this pandemic, where there are gaps in the recovery capability and how to fill these to satisfy expectations. Learn more here
A useful checklist of key actions and issues to be considered when developing people and pandemic plans can be downloaded as a PDF: