So you’re working hard throughout the day with uninterrupted productivity, when all of a sudden your entire office experiences a blackout. Is your place of business prepared for the unexpected? Here’s a couple of tips on how you can better prepare your business from catastrophe, and to ensure productivity does not take a massive hit.
1. Disaster Recovery Plans
Every business should have a disaster recovery plan implemented into their core procedures. In the event of an outage that may cause downtime, a DRP is your best bet to recover critical information and restore productivity.
Before coming up with a DRP, be sure to identify the most important elements of your business. These should be the processes that are imperative to your company’s continued operation. It’s also good practice to find alternatives to these processes and a measurement for how long your business can operate without them. The more information you have regarding the inner workings of your business, the better. Your DRP will successfully prioritize the most important aspects of your business to get you back on your feet quicker.
2. Make Sure Your Team Knows What to Do
What better way to get through a crisis than with a good, well organized team? Something you should consider for you business is training your employees to follow procedures that ensure productivity does not decline when an outage occurs. For example, if work can continue using pen and paper for the time being, then do so before transferring it electronically. Creating and distributing physical templates can also prevent any headaches around office productivity, allowing employees to fill out their work when digital solutions are unavailable. It is also recommended to have your team members recognize who is responsible for certain tasks when an outage occurs, allowing the business to quickly pivot operations without too much downtime.
3. Keep Your Customers Informed.
If your business relies on customer communication, consider building a status page for your website so that visitors can tell if your business is currently dealing with technical difficulties. This status page can also be kept up to date by sending visitors to key locations like your contact page, support accounts, and help pages. Another method could be adopted through social media channels that are operated by an external communications team, keeping followers up to date on the outage. It is important to remember that recovering from a disaster is better than not at all, and in some ways, an outage can have a positive outcome for how your customers will perceive your business.
4. Expect the Unexpected
After all of this, we hope you will feel a little more prepared than before when it comes to potential outages. However, the absolute best practice for you and your business to adopt is to keep an eye on exterior forces and always expect the unexpected. Outages can occur due to several factors such as bad weather or provider maintenance. If you can tell that something could potentially cause a disruption in your operations, it is best to implement your contingency plans right away before disaster even hits.
Be sure to always test your processes as well. It is all well and good to have a plan but testing that plan and ensuring it works makes sure that it does not become outdated or leaving you unprotected. Prepare for alternatives and ensure that when a worst-case scenario does occur, you are prepared for it.
