What is business continuity "awareness"?
Business continuity awareness is about creating familiarity and understanding of an organisations incident management and business continuity arrangements so that the whole organisation understands the arrangements in place and what will happen if the organisation invokes it's incident management and business continuity plan. To promote business continuity awareness and ensure that the whole organisation is prepared for a major incident, the approach to growing business continuity awareness within an organisation needs to consider:
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Who do we want to make “business continuity aware”?
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What exactly are we hoping to achieve with business continuity awareness?
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What business continuity topics are relevant to our audience?
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How do we deliver the content?
Many business continuity awareness training courses are on promoting the need for business continuity plans and what should go into them. This is fine if the audience is focused on developing business continuity plans but is not particularly relevant for members of the organisation who will be affected by an invocation of an organisations business continuity plan. Business continuity awareness training based around “why business continuity is important to our organisation” can tend to look like an "infomercial" for the business continuity function and will fail to engage or resonate with the wider organisation
Who are we aiming the awareness programme at?
A business continuity awareness programme is primarily aimed at the wider organisation – not the smaller cadre of individuals who will direct the activities involved with initial incident management and recovery. Although the whole organisation will be participating in some way, they will not be initiating plans at the strategic or operational level. So, in terms of establishing organisation-wide business continuity awareness, we are looking to reach those members of the organisation who will be affected by the decision to invoke the plan. In other words – this is an awareness programme is aimed at non-specialists – they don’t need to know how to “do" business continuity but they do need to know what could happen when the plan is invoked and what resources might be available to help them understand what is going on.
What are we trying to achieve with business continuity awareness training?
A business continuity awareness programme is primarily aimed at the wider organisation – not the smaller cadre of individuals who will direct the activities involved with initial incident management and recovery. Although the whole organisation will be participating in some way, they will not be initiating plans at the strategic or operational level. So, in terms of establishing organisation-wide business continuity awareness, we are looking to reach those members of the organisation who will be affected by the decision to invoke the plan. In other words – this is an awareness programme is aimed at non-specialists – they don’t need to know how to “do" business continuity but they do need to know what could happen when the plan is invoked and what resources might be available to help them understand what is going on.
What topics should business continuity awareness training include ?
The key to successful and effective business continuity awareness is relevance of the content – relevance to the people you want to reach. So make it relevant by:
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Explaining what is likely to happen under specific circumstances. These will of course be specific to the type of organisation and the provisions and preparations made in the business continuity plan. But, at a minimum, it should include evacuation procedures, building lockdown procedures, arrangements in place for relocation (including transport and off-site accommodation) and remote working arrangements.
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Explain how notification of a major incident will be made. Will it be by sms, via a messaging “app”, telephone call or other type of communication. Visual examples where possible. are better than words.
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Explaining what should be done on receipt of the notification. When the notification is received what action should be taken on its receipt? Go somewhere? Doing something (confirming receipt of the message, monitor an information source, for instance)
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Explaining where and how access to situation updates will be achieved. Who will the primary contact be for incident updates? This could be their line manager, a messaging service or social media "app".
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Demonstrate senior management involvement – include an introduction by a board director (audio or video if possible) explaining why they have developed a business continuity plan and why it is important that everyone understands the plan and how it could affect them
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Create familiarisation in the content by showing organisation specific “artifacts”. Showing pictures or videos of any work area recovery facilities, simulation of events (such as what an incident notification would look like). Making the content “come alive”, make it more relevant and make it more engaging. Bland, generic content will quickly erode engagement.
Business continuity awareness initiatives that include the attributes discussed above achieve wider engagement and maintain awareness levels. All of the content outlined above can be developed with standard office software that is available to the majority of organisations. You can, however, significantly accelerate the development and deployment of your business continuity awareness programme by using our templates. They have been developed and deployed for many organisations to establish good levels of business continuity awareness.
Business Continuity Awareness Template
A template for building a business continuity awareness PowerPoint and a mobile device friendly quick reference guide is an integral part of our business continuity plan template & toolkit.
More about Business Continuity Awareness
Deploying Business Continuity Awareness Programmes
Using nudges and memory joggers to maintain business continuity awareness
Using quick reference guides to aid business continuity awareness
Download the business continuity plan template
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