What is an Emergency Operations Plan?
Daily, you know, more or less, how your business is going to run. You know which employees might be a few minutes late, you know who is going to show up and give you 100% no matter what, and you know how to handle the challenges that may arise. Knowing what to do demonstrates experience and confidence. Knowing what to do or demonstrating experience can only occur in the moment by work accomplished before the disaster or emergency. An Emergency Operations Plan is the guide you follow to be most effective at stopping the damage occurring to your business (the facilities, the individuals, and the organization as a whole). An Emergency Operations Plan is the piece that turns chaos into organized and calculated activity working towards a common intentional goal of restoring the organization to its pre-emergency condition.
The Importance of Emergency Planning
The difference between having an Emergency Operations Plan and not having one is similar to when you are on your way to an important meeting, dressed in a suit, and your baby spits up all over your suit sleeve. If you are faced with a messy closet, your morning will be much more challenging than if you have a clean one. Yes, you have other clothing, but which shirt or blouse? What socks go with the different shoes you have to wear? An Emergency Operations Plan serves the same purpose as a clean closet. When the worst-case scenario happens, you have something pre-assembled to help guide you through, lessening the severity of the impacts.
Suppose you have an Emergency Operations Plan when a disaster hits. In that case, you are walking into an organized closet, a closet where you have choices and options, where you can, without breaking much of a sweat, find a new suitable outfit that you feel confident in, that you feel comfortable in, and that empowers you to be your best version of yourself. The sections of an EOP are tailored, like a nice jacket, in such a way that they are a guide, providing direction on the most critical tasks and activities.
The Main Components of an Emergency Operations Plan
As you read through an Emergency Operations Plan, you will notice it is essentially directions on how to do essential activities, organized in the most critical format. This direction includes a concept of operations, or CONOPS, which provides a concise overview of the leadership's objectives and priorities and how to accomplish them under all circumstances. It also discusses life safety elements, like how and when to shelter in place and when to conduct a staff accountability check-in.
Furthermore, an Emergency Operations Plan houses assignments of who does what, how information about the impacts sustained by the organization will be gathered and shared with senior leadership and employees, and how to communicate to clients. In addition, there is documentation on how emergency financial and administrative practices will be conducted. Finally, Functional Annexes; maybe you have one massive threat or hazard that is both likely to happen and likely to have an enormous impact on your business. A functional annex takes the opportunity of foresight to dive into your organization's response in more detail by addressing how the organization would address this specific threat or hazard in a very detailed format.