Department of Emergency Management and Security

CONTACT INFORMATION: Open during regular business hours 8 a.m. - 4:30p.m., Monday - Friday
4890 Alliance Drive, Suite 2200, Fairfax, VA 22030
Seamus Mooney
Coordinator

Department Resources

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Business Readiness

"Up to 40% of businesses affected by a natural or man-made disaster never reopen," according to the Insurance Institute. Determining how your business and your employees will recover from an emergency is a vital step in ensuring your continuity.

If employees are not prepared, they stay home, which hinders your business' ability to stay in business.

 

Business Preparedness Planning

Business preparedness is focused on providing value to businesses and their partners by increasing resiliency. This is done by implementing plans and procedures to ensure that each component of a business is prepared to respond and recover from a disruption. This is verified by a training and exercise program that continually improves resiliency. Eliminating single points of failure while smartly introducing redundancies will allow business operations to continue to provide services to their customers.

Business Preparedness Plan Template

Steps to Ensuring Your Business is Prepared

Ensuring that your business is prepared for an emergency or a disaster is vital to your business' success.  Utilizing the twelve steps below will help you create a plan, ensure safety of your clients and employees, and find gaps within your current models.

  1. Identify alternative locations - pre-plan to move your operations to another location, that has already been reviewed and approved, if your original location is not accessible due to a disaster.
  2. Build a cross-functional team - start by identifying a Primary Crisis Manager and then build out an Emergency Planning Team. 
  3. Identify critical operations - create a prioritized list of your critical operations, staff, and procedures that you need to recover from a disaster.
  4. Create an action plan - use our Business Preparedness Plan template to help you stay in business after the emergency occurs.
  5. Train your staff - ensure your staff know the plan and are trained on their role before, during, and after a disaster. 
  6. Maintain and fine tune through exercises - put your plan into action with an exercise to see where tweaks need to be made so it's operational.
  7. Don’t forget your supply chain - ensure you know where you will be able to obtain supplies and materials with a list of suppliers before, during and while recovering from an emergency to get back to business faster.
  8. Protect your operations with cyber security - include in your planning to protect your computer hardware, software, and what to do if computers are destroyed by a disaster.

 

 

Business Preparedness Planning

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