Be prepared for the worst
New Zealand has been through the wringer in the past ten years or so, with a pandemic, multiple cyclones causing flooding and landslides, a significant volcanic eruption, fires, a war-induced fuel crisis, and more. Whether or not your business was affected by any of these, they should serve as a reminder that it’s important to be prepared.
Kiwis are known for their “she’ll be right” attitude—which works until it doesn’t. While that attitude is fun at parties, it’s not so appealing when confronted with an event. When it comes to emergencies, relying on things working out isn’t a strategy. Situations can escalate quickly, and without clear plans in place, uncertainty and delays can make things harder than they need to be.
We’ve seen the value of preparation firsthand. During a recent weather event, one of our clients had team members temporarily (and completely) cut off from usual communication channels. They were able to stay connected by relaying messages through supplier networks - an example of Kiwi ingenuity and practical problem-solving in action.
That experience prompted a broader reflection on how their emergency response plans would perform in practice, leading to improvements that strengthened their overall readiness. Building that level of resilience into a structured, well-tested plan helps make these situations easier to manage for everyone involved.
What is an emergency response plan and what might it include?
Many businesses already have some form of emergency plan in place. The real question is whether it would work in practice - under pressure, with the people and systems you have today.
As an employer, you should be prepared to keep your employees safe in an emergency. Situations to consider include:
- Damage to your building or buildings in which staff are working.
- People being trapped somewhere
- A lack of transport.
- Broken lines of communication.
- Injuries, or threat of injury or illness.
- Risk of fire, flooding, and contamination.
- Limited or reduced supply of crucial resources such as fuel or materials.
While most businesses (and even many households!) have fire or earthquake evacuation policies in place for their premises, the recent weather events (and the recent pandemic) have demonstrated that more is needed. Your plan should include emergency procedures for fire, earthquake, tsunami, and other natural emergencies plus manmade ones such as a robbery or chemical spill.
You should think about evacuation procedures, assembly points, and warning systems. There should be procedures in place for when and how to contact employees, contractors, families, insurance providers, and any other relevant parties. Staff with limited mobility should be specifically thought of and catered for in the plan.
It should also be clear who leads in an emergency, how decisions are made, and how communication flows when normal operations are disrupted. Just as importantly, plans need to be tested - because what works on paper doesn’t always hold up in practice.
As our client learnt recently, if you have people on the road then you must include procedures for staff stranded away from home or your main work premises. For example, you might specify authorisations for use of company funds to procure accommodation and food where needed.
Emergency management is about more than just safety. It directly impacts your ability to keep operating: maintaining supply, servicing customers, and protecting revenue. Events like fuel shortages, disrupted shipping, or loss of a key person can affect your business just as significantly as a physical emergency. We’ve seen it all happen; it’s not just hypothetical!
Risks: what do you stand to lose?
Any emergency situation, natural disaster or otherwise, is not good news. Often, there will be effects for your business, whether those be people-related or financial. And of course, those can be directly attributed to the circumstance. However, without solid policies, procedures, and training that lay out how your team should respond, you are taking a bigger risk. A plan will help you to minimise consequences—or avoid the worst of them!
There’s the situation that our clients faced in the recent cyclone: staff members stranded, cut off from communication. You might have people trapped in a building. You could have teams that are scared and unsure about what action to take. Whatever the scenario, without a clear procedure, the likelihood of poor or delayed decisions increases.
We have also talked before about how policies can reduce your legal liability, as they demonstrate the efforts you have taken to reduce risk. Read more about that here!
In practice, emergency response sits across your safety systems, your people and communication processes, your operational controls, and your commercial continuity.
The benefits of an emergency response plan
It’s simple. A plan makes you prepared to respond better when disaster strikes! If everyone is aware of the plan and it is up to date, you stand the best chance of your people and property coming through it as unharmed as possible.
Financially, an ERP plan is a fantastic investment. Sure, you may never need to use it. But if you do, it could save you a huge amount of money and time. Even with the best insurance policies in place, the aftermath of something like a flood can be costly.
Create your plan
How do you go about making an ERP that’s effective and comprehensive?
A strong emergency response plan isn’t built from a template. It’s built from how your business actually operates. Here are our top tips!
- Review your current ERP, if you have one. Use real-life situations to identify gaps—for example, consider anything you experienced or other businesses experienced during the recent cyclone to decide what is missing from your plan.
- Whether you are updating your ERP or creating one from scratch, there are several resources you can use. These include the workplace preparedness page of the National Emergency Management Agency site and SiteSafe’s guide to emergency response planning. Sign up for the NZ ShakeOut earthquake drill and participate annually.
- In addition to paperwork, you should ensure that you have any physical equipment required for an emergency response, stored in appropriate places. For example: fire extinguishers, water and other provisions, PPE.
- Create a training schedule that takes emergency preparedness into account—having someone trained in First Aid is important for this and many other reasons.
- Test your plan! This Spiceworks survey of businesses across North America and Europe showed that while 95% of organisations had some kind of disaster recovery plan in place, but 23% of those never test their plan at all. This eliminates opportunities to identify gaps and improve their response, and increases risk.This could be a drill, or could be simply talking through the plan with the team to spot holes or issues.
Continuous improvement is always the goal for business systems, and this is no exception! Operations, premises, equipment, and risks change over time, so it’s crucial to regularly review your emergency response plans.
Regulators expect fire drills once every six months; ShakeOut happens once a year. As for other emergencies, frequency of drills and reviews will be up to you and should be based on degree of risk (likelihood of the event happening, weighed against extent of potential consequences). Remember due diligence: it’s easy to ignore emergency planning, but if the worst should happen, you’ll want to be able to demonstrate that you did what you could to be prepared.
TL;DR—what you need to know
Didn’t read the article? Read this:
- Do you have a plan, and would it actually work in practice?
- Use real scenarios (like recent NZ events) to test and strengthen your response
- Make sure roles, decisions, and communication are clear—not assumed
- Review and test regularly. Don’t wait for a real event to expose gaps
If needed, get support to build something practical and fit for your business
Seek help
If you need support, Emendas can help you work through your emergency response (and other important documentation) in a practical, business-relevant way, ensuring it aligns with how your organisation actually operates. Get in touch with us today.