Developing resilient communities against all hazards requires leadership from government and business. Preparing the workforce, building safe facilities, investing in supplier relationships, and connecting to the community are all key pillars of true business community resilience—from the boardroom to the storefront.
The path to leadership involves connecting with the right people and resources and committing to action by helping the business community and whole community mitigate the hazards they face and bounce back quickly after an incident. Plus, it can decrease the overall costs of disruptions and disasters.
This page features the basics of this simple, scalable roadmap for businesses of all sizes.
The Leadership Path
The most successful leaders take action in a coordinated and collaborative way.
They integrate into a supportive environment that recognizes effective and actionable best practices and understand what makes a public-private partnerships successful. This in turn enables state and local partnership development and growth, as well as integration into planning, preparedness, and operational activities.
Connecting
The first step to becoming better prepared or becoming a leader is connecting within the community and industry. As the connections to people and resources grow across sectors, trust, aptitude for transparency, and efficiency in developing a preparedness program does too.
Integrating
Planning, Training, Exercises are fundamental to community preparedness. Identifying the challenges facing both government and private sector in these scenarios contributes to mutual understanding and community resilience.
Coordinating
Solving problems together in disruption, disasters, or crisis help the whole community work through adverse situations. Businesses have a unique opportunity in identifying capabilities that can help during emergencies. Government has responsibility to help businesses stay in business. As a result, customers and citizens benefit.
Collaborating
Influencing the community way ahead through mitigation, recovery, and strategies that enable resilience.
Committing
Growing your role as a leader in the community or industry - encouraging others to connect and take action.
This leadership path gives businesses of all sizes a roadmap to follow for building their own all-hazards preparedness and contributes to the resilience of their community or industry as well.
Information Sharing
Decisions need to be made before, during, and after disruption – regardless of magnitude. For businesses – either there is the normal and the not so normal, this is whether there is a local, state, or Federal declaration of emergency or disaster. Everyday nearly 30 million businesses of all sizes are constantly identifying problems, risks, and coping with crisis.
Sharing information helps translate ambiguity into clarity. Sharing is also based on a trusted relationship. Developing this trust within a community or state emergency operations center, state fusion center, business emergency operations center, and other information sharing centers can enable business and government leaders to improve decision-making.
Pillars of Business Preparedness
Whether a Fortune 500 company, a regional manufacturer, or a new online business, preparing employees, evaluating and mitigating risks to systems, structures, and supply chains, and engaging in communities will make a business more resilient.
Staff
Preparing your employees for the threats and hazards likely to impact their community. By preparing your staff for the threats and hazards likely to impact your business, you can ensure that your people know how to stay safe in a disaster.
Structure & Systems
Taking deliberate actions to evaluate, mitigate, and reduce physical, cyber, and operational risks. A business’s physical structures and technology systems are some of its largest investments and need protected.
Suppliers
Working with suppliers to share preparedness knowledge, expect business continuity practice, and build confidence in your supply chain. Securing your supply chain, both locally and globally, is an essential component to improving your business’s likelihood to cope with disruptions and survive a disaster.
Service
Engaging with community leaders, emergency managers, planners, and elected officials to support pre-incident preparedness planning. In addition to preparing your organization, it is important to understand your local, tribal, state, and territorial community emergency plans and capabilities.
Focusing on these pillars builds capacity and can yield a competitive advantage benefiting businesses and the communities they serve.
Resources
Resource to build employee preparedness, an adaptive supply chain, resilient structures and internal systems, and community involvement and service are below.
Staff Preparedness
- American Red Cross Ready Rating
- America’s PrepareAthon
- FEMA Mobile App
- Preparedness information for businesses via the Ready Campaign
- Small Business Administration
Structure and Systems
ICC/NSSA 500-2014: Standard for the Design and Construction of Storm Shelters
Strengthen your supply chain:
- Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety EZ-Prep Guide
- National Preparedness Goal, Supply Chain Integrity and Security Core Capability
- National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security
Build a service-oriented business:
- State, Tribal and Territorial Emergency Management Agency listings
- America’s PrepareAthon! Prepare Your Organization Playbooks
- St. Bernard Project (SBP) Business Resource Guide and Checklist
For more information, please contact: FEMA-Private-Sector@fema.dhs.gov