Sustainability & Risk/ Emergency Preparedness / Emergency Response and Recovery Teams

Emergency Response and Recovery Teams

To handle an emergency, sites often designate employees to be part of emergency response teams and recovery teams. Depending on the size of your site, these may be distinct roles or the functions may be handled by the same person.

Note: See Creating a Recovery Team List for information on assigning employees to recovery teams.

The following are typical jobs of the emergency response and recovery teams:

Assisting First Responders in Evacuation

Ensuring employee safety is a top priority. As a member of the emergency response team, you may need to aid first responders in accounting for employees by providing them with the following reports:

Notifying Emergency Contacts

Contact Employees' Emergency Contacts

In the event that an employee has been injured or is missing during an emergency, you'll want to inform the employee's contacts about the situation. Typically, business process owners at your site have established emergency contact information for each employee.

Use these tasks to access employees' emergency contacts:

Contact your Company's Emergency Contacts

Typically, business process owners or others at your site have previously established a list of companies, clients, government agencies, insurance companies, vendors, and other parties that your company will want to inform if an emergency occurs. As a member of the emergency response team, you may need to inform these parties that an emergency has occurred and it may disrupt normal business and operations. You may need to explain the effects of the emergency, such as that shipping will be delayed, meetings have been postponed, inspections will be needed, and so on.

Use the following tasks to access a list of your company's emergency contacts:

You can use the Smart Search console to filter the contact list by property, site, building, status, and other criteria. Since a contact can be associated with all the buildings, sites, and properties that they visit, you will be sure to view the appropriate list of contacts for the specified property, building, or site. This type of filtering can be important when emergency contacts are associated with more that one property, site or building.

During an emergency, you may find that additional parties should be added to this list so that they are readily available in the event of future emergencies. The list is typically maintained by your site's business process owner. For information, see Creating an Emergency Contacts List.

Checking Contingency Locations for Employees

In order to begin recovery processes, you need to find new locations for employees. Some sites define contingency locations for employees in the event that their office becomes unusable during an emergency. Check an employee's contingency location with these tasks:

Preparing to Escalate Required Purchases

To resume operations, a company might need to quickly buy new furniture or lease new space. As a Recovery Team Member, you may not normally have authority to make these purchases or decisions. However, if your site has established an escalation contacts list – staff who have authority in an emergency to expedite decisions and purchases – you can inform this staff of your needs and get the process started. Consult your escalation contacts with this task:

Checking Status

The assessment team typically visits rooms and equipment, checks their state, and updates their status.

As part of the emergency response team, you may need to check the status of rooms and equipment so that you can start to plan the recovery. These reports highlight by the Recovery Status value. The colors for each status are defined in the definition of the Recovery Status field.

The colors are:

Color Status
Yellow No Status
Light Blue No Status Under Review
Lilac Fit for Use
Turquoise Fit for Use Offline
Light Green Fit for Use Destroyed
Lilac Unfit for Use Recoverable

Reviewing Hazard Plans and Zones

As part of your task to ensure employee safety during and after an emergency, you may need to view the hazards for each floor. The following tasks highlight floor plans by various types of hazard information.

Updating Employee Status and Advisory Bulletins

Update Advisory Bulletins for Staff

General staff and managers can sign in from home to check the status of the situation and determine whether they should report to a contingency location, work from home, take a day off, and so on. As a member of the recovery team, you create these bulletins that inform staff and management of the current conditions. To do so, run this task:

Updating Employees Status

Once employees are evacuated and accounted for, you will want to record their status in the system so that this information is available to management and others overseeing the recovery effort. There are two methods: