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Extreme Emergency Management

When disaster strikes, CSOs can be geniuses or goats.

However, I believe it was the more subtle opportunities that most dramatically impacted security’s credibility within the organization. Let’s face it, security does not always engender positive characterizations. This opportunity gave us the ability to provide a positive service to employees in a visible and tangible way. Moving people to safety during a crisis or enabling a business to manage effectively through a disruptive event is wonderful internal PR for a support organization like security. Additionally, emergency response planning built interdependencies between security and human resources, operations, sales and real estate services. Security leveraged this responsibility to open the door to all facets of the business, even the resistant ones. Security even developed metrics and reporting around emergency response, so that it could provide process improvement data. For example, in one of our operations, security was able to quantify the impact of false alarms by landlord-owned life safety systems. The information drove our real estate attorneys to address the topic more specifically in our leases.

This period also has presented certain traps in emergency response planning that could have negatively impacted security departments. Unquestionably, there was an emotional ingredient to planning that affected security executives. The pendulum swung, and the positioning to plan for all emergencies or incidents threatened to take precedence over scalability. At its worst, planning for all extremes translated into security seeking sizable budget increases to support resource needs that in the long run were not sustainable. The planning-for-all-extremes position may make others see security managers as fearmongers. When security’s planning is out of touch with the true risks to the business and employees, they will not be welcomed at the budget table or in the employee lounge.

To me, nothing exemplifies this issue of scalability better than the planning and posturing surrounding the Asian bird flu pandemic. Some businesses, such as those in the financial world, need to build robust emergency response plans because the financial markets must be maintained. But if the pandemic does become reality, do luxury retailers or theme park owners really need to develop a plan to keep their doors open for customers, rather than simply planning to bridge the financial gap for their employees during the outbreak?

Sticking to Your Principles

Successful emergency response is completed by keeping to some very basic principles. First, the plan must have the full endorsement of the company’s senior management. This will give security the proper funding to execute the plan correctly, and it will allow for an understanding of the plan’s decision-making hierarchy during times of crisis. For example, our plan required us to establish an executive decision team made up of the top three executives available during an emergency. Our senior management team members were required to force-rank themselves so that an executive decision team could be created quickly. Had this procedure been in place on 9/11, we could have removed much ambiguity and reached decisions that affected our employees and business operations much more quickly.