Emergency Notification Procedures: Is Your Business Prepared for the Unexpected?

An emergency has just struck your commercial building, and you need to notify your tenants right away. What do you do?

Today’s businesses must navigate a risk landscape that is becoming increasingly complex. However, if you master the art and science of communication, you boost your incident management capabilities. And, in turn, you increase your and your tenants’ chances of staying afloat following a crisis.

When it comes to an emergency, communication is at the heart of ensuring the safety of your tenants. Here’s a rundown on some of the most emergency notification procedures to implement in 2020.

Why Emergency Notification Is Important

Having emergency notification procedures in place is critical for multiple reasons. For one, threats like cyber-attacks, terrorist acts, workplace violence, and natural disasters can happen anytime. And they can put your operations and properties at risk. Besides, these types of disasters can cause harm to members of the workforce who are working in your building.

State, local, and federal regulations also require building owners to create emergency action plans along with life safety plans to keep their tenants, property managers, and visitors safe.

With the emergency notification or incident management platform, you can more easily prepare for these types of disasters. You can also more readily respond to them when they do occur. In the end, you can protect both workers and your property. The right procedures will help you to adequately inform tenants and their employees about what to do in a crisis. They will also minimize the impacts of a disaster on a business.

Incident Management Tool

Cutting-edge technology is one of the most valuable tools available today for managing a wide range of incidents, such as hurricanes, winter storms, and isolated incidents.  For instance, a top-notch tool will allow you to send alerts to tenants and employees using a variety of mediums. These mediums include, for example, push notifications, emails, text messages, and voice messages. The more mediums you use to send out an emergency message, the better your chances of reaching all of your recipients no matter where they may be at the time. 

However, in addition to allowing you to provide mass emergency notifications, your chosen platform should enable you to engage in business continuity planning.

In other words, your solution should do more than just send messages. It needs to be a one-stop-shop platform that also allows you to provide training (more on that later), share documents, and manage incidents. A comprehensive solution will allow you to save money, save time, and better prepare for crises. 

Also, make sure that the system you choose is reliable. It needs to be able to notify everybody right away. Otherwise, your tenants and their employees may be more likely to suffer death or injury. Furthermore, the advanced technology solution you choose still needs to be relatively simple and user-friendly. Selecting a solution that comes with strong customer support is also imperative for the best outcomes every time.

Training on Emergency Procedures

Having the right plans and procedures in place for dealing with crises is only half the battle. You also need to personally train your tenants and their employees on how to handle disasters. Why? Because even if you have an emergency response plan in place, if your tenants are unfamiliar with it, they will be at a loss for what to do when a crisis occurs.

When you offer your tenants training, start by ensuring that the tenants are familiar with your established emergency preparedness basics. You may assume that your tenants already know basic best practices. However, they may not, which means that the other information you share with them in training will fall on deaf ears, too. Simply put, the more you review the basics with your tenants, the more likely an emergency response situation will be handled efficiently.

Also, make sure that you go over your emergency response plans regularly—at least once per year.

Interactive online training sessions are generally the most convenient to use. It is especially true when you have a large number of tenants or employees to train. With online training, your tenants and their workers can complete your preparation according to their own schedules. They may even be able to track their progress while training.

Finally, make sure that you actively encourage your tenants to complete your emergency response training. If you conduct in-person training, you could provide treats or lunch to draw people to the training session. Or, you could give gift certificates to those who complete their online training. The more creative you are, the better your chances of having a nearly 100% training participation rate. 

How Preparis Can Help with Incident Management

We offer a top-of-the-line incident management tool, Preparis Alerts, for helping you to deal with crises effectively. 

Preparis Alerts is an emergency notification app that offers the unique benefits of analytics reporting as well as document sharing using the cloud. It also provides emergency messaging capabilities that are bi-directional, as well as expert online employee training. The app can also come in handy for assigning tasks, generating and managing plans, and keeping track of your relevant documents.

With this app, you can demonstrate your compliance with industry safety standards. Besides, you can provide your employees with visibility into the organization’s crisis readiness.

Get in touch with us to learn more about how Preparis can help you to take your emergency procedures to a whole new level in 2020 and beyond.