Hurricanes, Blizzards, and Pandemics... OH MY!
There’s a famous scene in Wizard of Oz where Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and Tin Man are walking in the dark through the forest. The conversation went like this:
Dorothy: Do you suppose we’ll meet any wild animals?
Tin Man: We Might.
Scarecrow: Animals that eat … STRAW?
Tin Man: Some, but mostly lions, tigers, and bears.
Dorothy: Lions?
Scarecrow: Tigers?
Tin Man: and Bears!
Dorothy: Lions, and tigers and bears… OH MY!
There’s a lot of justifiable fear walking into 2022, just as there was for our three heroes walking into the dark forest that night many years ago. What will our lions, tigers, and bears be in the coming 12 months? Will there be scorpions, or maybe zombies too? Your crystal ball is as good as mine when planning for the challenges 2022 will undoubtedly throw our way. But there are some common threads that we should have learned through recent challenges that we can plan for.
For example, a security or recovery plan for IT systems is comfort food for an event that you hope never calls for it. Regardless, you prepare for an orderly shutdown of systems, restoration of backups, and even bringing alternate mission-critical systems online from a different location. What could cause this? The reasons are almost as many as the grains of sand on a beach… Lightning strike? Mechanical failure? Flood? Attacks? Ransomware? Who knows! Regardless, you do have a plan on how to get critical systems back online and available quickly.
Even in our world of ethics, compliance, and HR technology solutions, we have contingency plans – you wouldn’t buy systems that didn’t, after all. We practice them by simulating disasters that are unannounced so that our folks know how to react, who to notify, and what processes will have to change until things normalize. That’s the tech side, but what about the policy side?
The Climate Crisis and the Workforce
Given the erratic severe weather ranging from out of control wildfires, heat, droughts, hurricanes, tornados, and blizzards, they all have at least one similarity. They force some, many, or even all employees to work from home or some other safe place. We have seen the flooding following hurricanes that paralyze whole cities for weeks or months, a pandemic entering its second year, tornados leveling entire cities, and wildfires making towns a memory.
The intensity, duration, and frequency of these events are on the increase and the next variant is right around the corner. Global climate change is accelerating – droughts, floods, wildfires, tornados, and hurricanes are signs of this. In various parts of the world, political instability compound the calculus. Regardless, it’s a safe assumption to think that at some point in 2022 we will send employees home to work.
Work-From-Home Policy Preparedness
Last year, work-from-home policies – and preparations – took a beating. Companies that sent home employees suddenly learned that their VPNs were not designed to support that volume of persistent traffic and remote employees could not get online. But HR, ethics, and compliance issues didn’t slow down. They may have changed a bit, but they still required investigations, and investigators were faced with challenges in witness interviews and lack of security videos and logs, making allegations tougher to substantiate.
So what can we do? First, we would suggest you take a look at your work from home policies. We know now that they are not a seldom-used afterthought and should not be glossed over. We should not wait until we have a prolonged work from home environment to determine if our governance is adequate in that environment.
Although the causes are virtually unlimited, the only safe assumption is that we will again have some work-from-home situation. It will come on us with little or no notice. We have to trust in the policies and procedures in place to manage those trying times.
I’ll leave you with one question: if you have to pull the ripcord on your work-from-home policy with little to no notice, and for an undetermined period of time, do you have the policies in place to ease that transition? At ETHIX360, we work with our clients through tabletop exercises to stress test their work from home and other emergency policies. After all, the lions, tigers, and bears will come at the time that is the most inconvenient, and from the direction least affected.
If you’re a client already, we’d love to help you run a WFH Tabletop Exercise, and if you’re not a client, we can still run the exercise regardless of the vendor you use for the related systems.
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MEET THE AUTHOR
J Rollins is the co-founder and CEO of ETHIX360. J is a well known leader and innovator who has served on senior leadership teams ranging in responsibility from Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, SVP of Product Strategy and Chief Operating Officer.
ABOUT ETHIX360
At ETHIX360, our goal is simple: to provide an affordable, flexible, and comprehensive answer to employee communication, policy management, corporate training and case management on issues related to corporate ethics, code of conduct, fraud, bribery, and workplace violence.
