Organizations in all industries face threats on a variety of fronts, from deadly pandemics and natural disasters to a rise in social unrest and cyberattacks. The most resilient organizations have robust teams with the expertise to navigate these complex situations — and state-of-the-art critical event management (CEM) technology and risk intelligence technology to back them up.
Bottom line: If you want to protect your people, places and property, you need that level of support. Here are the three most effective ways to take your organization’s CEM capabilities to the next level.
1. Designate a Crisis Response Team
If your organization doesn’t already have one, form a crisis response team responsible for implementing your critical event management plan during crisis situations. The team should include representatives from all major departments, and they should consider all stakeholders and every possible scenario when developing a CEM plan.
For instance, you might already have a way to alert employees during an emergency, but what about workplace visitors or store customers who happen to be on site? How will you notify them?
Your crisis response team should meet for multiple scenario planning sessions to brainstorm potential threats to your organization and map out the most likely scenarios of cascading events. For each emergency scenario, they should set strategies that include ways to:
- Identify incidents
- Communicate with stakeholders
- Mitigate damage
- Safeguard people, places and property
- Restore normal business operations
It’s important to embrace a range of perspectives on the crisis response team, but it’s also a good idea to assign leaders who’ll carry out plans and issue alerts. When a crisis hits, everyone needs to know their role. That’s why it’s crucial to conduct regular training and testing of all CEM plans and emergency mass communication systems.
2. Make Your Critical Event Management Plans Easily Accessible
Once your organization has formed a response team and created CEM plans, make sure anyone who needs to see them has easy access. When an incident occurs, your team needs to know exactly where to look for the answers to their questions.
Digitize all your plans so any employee around the globe can pull them up in an instant to review the recommended procedures for a given scenario. Digital plans are not only more accessible but also scalable and easier to update. Keep paper copies on hand strictly as backup.
Does your organization have an emergency mass communication system? If so, ask your crisis response team to create a digital library of message templates for a variety of scenarios. With templates at the ready, initiators can simply pull up a pre-written alert and tweak the wording for the situation rather than drafting a message from scratch in the heat of the moment.
Just knowing that CEM plans and emergency communications are always ready can give your team the confidence to handle any situation.
3. Implement Modern Critical Event Management
Your organization can have the best crisis response team in the world, but if they’re not using modern technology, they’re not operating at their peak.
Modern critical event management harnesses AI-powered risk intelligence, which allows security leaders to anticipate imminent threats to your organization faster and with greater accuracy. AI-powered risk intelligence aggregates complex data on any given situation, tracks feeds from thousands of sources, sorts through the noise and then synthesizes and distributes the data so your response team can act on it — in real time.
Using AI-powered risk intelligence, a modern CEM platform provides dynamic, interactive maps of critical events that show their proximity to your people, places and property — and free up your security team to make better, more strategic decisions.
The most advanced CEM platforms also provide a proven and reliable way to communicate with stakeholders in an emergency. When an incident occurs, you need to get the right information to the right people at the right time, so they can take immediate action. Integrated critical communications not only allow your response team to send out instant geo-targeted, two-way alerts. They play a key role in safeguarding employees and business assets and ensuring operational continuity.
Finally, truly modern CEM incorporates mobile incident management to put control in the palm of your response team’s hands. With mobile incident management, your team can seamlessly coordinate their crisis response, access response plans from anywhere, keep track of actions taken and adjust their strategy as the recovery unfolds.
Learn More About the Easiest Approach to Critical Event Management
Critical event management doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does need to be coordinated. With a solid crisis response team and the help of the latest technology, your organization can address a critical event early and prevent it from becoming a full-blown crisis.
Discover how the OnSolve Platform for Critical Event Management can help your organization create the most successful outcomes when critical events occur. Request a demo today.
