Over 60% of businesses are NOT prepared for location-specific events, such as workplace violence or terrorism

We recently announced the results of our annual research collaboration with the Business Continuity Institute(BCI), entitled “The Emergency Communications Report 2016.” The third annual report surveyed over 600 industry professionals from more than 70 countries, reviewing emergency communications and security incident response plans for organizations around the world. The research found that a large percentage of organizations have an emergency communication plan, and that it is used across multiple departments. However, it also indicates that organizations take too long to implement their plans, need to be prepared to incorporate traveling and mobile employees and are far less prepared to handle location-based incidents, such as workplace violence and terrorism. In fact, one of the key findings was that, over 60 percent of businesses are not prepared for location-specific events, such as workplace violence or terrorism, Moreover:

• 30 percent have no communications plan in place to communicate with employees during workplace violence or terrorism.
• 56 percent are not confident in their preparation for workplace violence or terrorist incidents, and only 6 percent are “very much prepared.”
• 65 percent felt that simply locating people who may be in an impacted building was their biggest challenge in a workplace violence or terrorism situation; 76 percent indicated that the ability to communicate with those people and confirm their safety was a major concern.

It’s clear that organizations are making progress in their emergency communications plans and approaches but that they are still seeking solutions to optimize their critical event management and response plans for the mobile workforce and to adapt to the growing complexity of business operations and location-based security incidents.