No one was prepared to handle the COVID-19 outbreak. What do security directors need to do now to address it? Here are six important steps to mitigating the risk associated with this outbreak.
The impacts of COVID-19 are growing every day and won’t be fully understood for months. Even small businesses that don’t engage in global travel will and are being affected by the virus, and organizations with colleagues in healthcare, retail, hospitality, and many other sectors face significant potential exposure to the virus.
Corporate Security Directors play a pivotal role in collecting, processing, and disseminating intelligence to all stakeholders within the company quickly and efficiently. Maintaining business continuity during a crisis can often be at odds with upholding the company’s duty of care, so executives require accurate information to make the right decisions and communications tools to keep everyone informed.
Scott Frigaard, a subject matter expert within advanced security solutions for smart cities, has outlined six major action steps to assist companies in their efforts to navigate the COVID-19 outbreak.
- Form a COVID-19 Committee
One of the first steps of an effective response plan involves forming a COVID-19 Committee. Serving as a unified clearinghouse for all COVID-19 information, the Committee should rapidly acquire, process, and distribute information across the organization. The Committee should also communicate with partners, outside service providers, and customers to ensure coordination and keep everyone informed.
Members of the Committee should include, at a minimum: corporate security, human resources, legal, IT, marketing/communications, operations, and finance. Additionally, an executive-level sponsor should be assigned from each Committee’s department.
The roles and responsibilities of the Committee
2. Create a Fusion Center to aggregate, analyze, and disseminate information
A Fusion Center is a technology and communications war room whose mission is to maintain the most up-to-date and accurate information on all people, operations, and virus status.
With the help of the latest technology applications, the Fusion Center should be capable of providing visualization tools and dashboards to monitor status of key performance indicators, essential personnel, critical assets, critical operations, locations, fixed and mobile assets, inventory, key suppliers, and many more.
Furthermore, utilizing Advanced Solutions will enable the Fusion Center to visualize all operations and personnel on a map, provide deep dives into the facility level, and present third party data overlays, allowing your organization to maintain top efficiency.
Major requirements for the Fusion Center
3. Assess your risk
Utilize information from national and global public health agencies, such as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for categorizing risk, in order to identify, predict, and mitigate the impact of the virus outbreak within your organization.
Factors to include in your risk assessment
4. Establish communication protocols
Clear, consistent, and transparent messaging is critical to alleviate employee anxiety, inform customers, and maximize productivity in the face of reduced staff. An effective mass notification system should help your organization to maintain effective and consistent communication with all employees and contractors.
Considerations for communication protocols
5. Establish policies and procedures
Promptly create and enact employee travel policies that will provide clear definitions of what is essential and nonessential in terms of business travels. Develop policies for personal travel with the guidelines which must be followed by your colleagues upon coming back to the office after a vacation. Ensure that your organization has a procedure and tools to monitor ongoing exposure risks.
Besides employee travel, however, it is also important to consider other practices that may transmit the virus and develop appropriate policies accordingly.
Telecommuting policies
Visitor policies
6. Incorporate business continuity planning
Identify all dependencies in your ecosystem to understand where disruptions might impact your supply chains, logistics, operations, sales, and service. Maintain continuous communication with employees, suppliers, vendors, and service providers to understand their preparations, inventory levels, and other important metrics. Identify potential points of failure in your ecosystem and plan for and identify alternatives.