To communicate or not, that is the question…

In the wake of the tragic events in Brussels on the 22 of March 2016, I had a number of conversations with business continuity, resiliency and security managers regarding the actions they took immediately following the ISIS attacks. I found the responses interesting and varied and a number of key learning threads emerged. Many faced challenges and difficult questions when trying to respond, these included:

• Easily identifying who has the authority to send a message.
• Knowing how to increase the chance of getting a response back from your message.
• If you choose not to send a message, knowing whether to inform your other regional offices. that you have not sent a message.
• Understanding whether employees expect a message even if you know everyone is safe.

Addressing such issues can be tricky for organisations of any size. A good place to start is to ask some simple questions.

WHO:

Who should take command and control of an incident?

Who should send a message?

WHAT:

What message should be sent and how.

What group should be communicated too?

What group should be reported too?

WHEN:

When should the message be sent?

When should the results be reported?

With these answers it is possible to start to build a framework that will enable your organisation to respond to any incident and then by clearly communicating your plan, it will assist you to respond to any crisis not just a terror attack.

I provide some more useful tips in my blog Using Mass Notification to Respond to a Terrorist Incident.

To learn more about Everbridge, visit https://www.everbridge.com/.