Hi, my name is Candice, and I am the human resources strategist. Today, we're going to be talking about creating an emergency action plan. An emergency action plan outlines what your managers and staff and you will do in the event of an emergency. It typically starts out by listing all of the important phone numbers and website addresses that people will need, like the two owners, all the owners, depending on how many owners there are-- the one owner, the managers at either the one location or many locations that you might have.
It lists out phone numbers for the power company, the local police, the fire department, all of those emergency services. Then, it goes on to describe what to do when an emergency happens. For example if someone has a heart attack, what are the steps that you take? If someone is hurt while at work, what are the steps that you take? If there's a fire, what happens? If the power goes out, what happens? If there's an earthquake, what happens?
Emergency action plans, a lot of companies take a long time to get around to creating them, but they're really important, because one of the safest ways to get through an emergency is to have a plan for what to do when the emergency happens. If there's an earthquake and nobody knows what to do when there's an earthquake and they don't know where to find the information about what to do [00:02:00] and there's no guidance, then people panic and make decisions that are based off of fear instead of based off of well-grounded and well thought out policies and procedures that your company has done and planned for during a non-emergency time.
The time to figure out what to do in an emergency is usually not during the emergency. You want to know what you will do in the emergency before it happens. That's the purpose of an emergency action plan is to spend time thinking about these worst case situations which are terrible and which we don't really want to think about, but when we're responsible for the lives of our staff, it's our responsibility to think through these things and to think through how we're going to keep them and our product- if we have a product- safe during these kinds of things.
I'm going to be including in the materials for this section a draft emergency action plan. This is specific for a restaurant, but it can be adapted to any different kind of business. It'll have different sections where you can put in information that is most applicable to you. It's also a sample plan, so that you can think through similar things which may not be in this action plan but that would be appropriate in your action plan, and to just get you started in thinking about this work.
Often, I have found that managers really like to work on these kinds of things. If you give over this work to a manager, have them really think through the details of what should happen, have them present the work back to you, and then you can go through and do a final draft, that's a really, really effective [00:04:00] way of doing this. If you have no managers and you are on your own working with your staff, then just taking a little bit of time, maybe an hour or two hours to set aside, to think constructively about this plan and what to do in these different kinds of emergency situations.
States and the federal government and even local governments have really good guidelines about what to do about things like fire and earthquake and what have you-- flood. It's good to mirror those policies as much as possible in your own internal policy. Then, once you develop this plan, it's not ideal if you create it, and then it sits on a shelf and no one knows about it, because then the emergency will happen and it will be as if you had not created this thing.
Once you have created the plan, provide it to your staff. If you have multiple levels of management, then provide it to whoever you think is most appropriate. If you have a smaller staff, then I recommend distributing it amongst all of your staff. Then, that way, if something does happen and if you're not there, or even if you are there and you can reference it also, then you'll be able to know what to do if something should happen. I hope that helps you prepare for emergencies which may happen in the future.
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