Go beyond planning and frequently practice what you intend to do during a disaster. Just as your business changes day-to-day, so should your plan. Drills and exercises will help you prepare.
- If you rent, lease or share office space, coordinate and practice evacuation and other emergency plans with other businesses in your building or facility.
- Conduct regularly scheduled education and training seminars to provide co-workers with information, identify needs and develop preparedness skills.
- Include preparedness training in new employee orientation programs.
- Do tabletop exercises with members of the emergency management team. Meet in a conference room setting to discuss individual responsibilities and how each would react to emergency scenarios.
- Schedule walk-through drills where the emergency management team and response teams actually perform their designated emergency functions. This activity generally involves more people and is more thorough than a tabletop exercise.
- Practice evacuating and sheltering. Have all personnel walk the evacuation route to a designated area where procedures for accounting for all personnel are tested. Practice your "shelter-in-place" plan.
- Evaluate and revise processes and procedures based on lessons learned in training and exercise.
- Keep training records.
