Make sure your business continuity plan catches on

Mark MacGregor

Swine flu has already caused problems for a number of small businesses. With firms set to lose £8.6bn from employees being off sick, they need to be prepared for
all eventualities.

The most important, yet obvious, step is to have a plan in place to keep your company running if the worst happens. If you already have a business continuity plan, revisit it to check whether the assumptions you made cover the potential impact of this kind of pandemic.

The first stage in devising a plan is to compile a list of the people upon whom your organisation is reliant and assess whether or not anyone could cover for them. Most business owners find some surprising individuals make it to the top of such a list ­ for example, the office manager who knows how the phone system works; the security guard who unlocks the premises; or the IT manager who can access staff passwords. Armed with this information, it is easier to determine who should be given alternative ways of working or the means to undertake someone else’s role.

Ensuring you can cope with this type of situation requires a small but vital amount of IT work to be completed in advance. For example, setting up all or some of your employees to work from home only involves altering the settings on home PCs to enable staff to connect remotely. It also allows you to test whether or not their home internet connection will be fast enough.

Finding out who holds passwords to unlock individual computers or files and keeping those in a secure, accessible place is another easy but often overlooked precaution.

Taking the opportunity to plan for a flu pandemic might be seen as a waste of time by many small firms, especially those hit by the recession. But the process can also demonstrate how easy it can be to change everyday work patterns. Expect to see more interest in remote working, cloud computing and hosted services as a consequence once the pandemic has passed.

Mark MacGregor is a BCS contributor