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RESPONSE AND RECOVERY PREPAREDNESS • THE OUTBREAK AND RAPID SPREAD OF COVID-19 HAS HIGHLIGHTED THE NEED FOR BUSINESSES TO PREPARE AND PLAN FOR THE ONGOING RESPONSE TO AND RECOVERY FROM THE PANDEMIC ON 31 DECEMBER 2019, the outbreak of a respiratory illness in Wuhan City in China was reported to the World Health Organisation (WHO). At that time, it was called 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCov), but has since been renamed Covid-19. Fast forward to mid-April 2020, and over 200 countries and territories around the world have reported a total of approximately 2 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 123,000 related deaths. The most obvious impact of this outbreak is how people are affected. Whether infected or not, Covid-19 and the associated preventive measures have fundamentally changed our social and professional working practices. Businesses have adopted and implemented alternative ways of working and many have
downsized by furloughing their workforce. Employers have two primary considerations at this time – a duty of care to their staff, and a duty of care to their shareholders and customers. BUSINESS IMPACT ASSESSMENT The first step when responding to employee absenteeism and planning business recovery is to undertake or refresh a business impact assessment (BIA). This is a systematic process that enables an organisation to evaluate its critical functions (e.g. services, products and processes). By identifying business-critical functions, organisations can focus their available employees to ensure that these are continued. Additionally, where functions have
been suspended, the BIA process highlights those that are most critical so they can be brought back online first. Crucially, the BIA process identifies which employee groups and what skillsets are essential to the delivery of critical functions. By doing this, it is possible to understand the impact a loss in personnel, across the business or in one specific area, may have on an organisation’s ability to deliver its critical functions and, equally, which employees must be brought back in to recover those functions. The BIA process also puts a timescale on any downtime (that is, how long the business can survive without this function). This is essential in enabling effective planning around employee shortages. Many businesses will already have BIA and business continuity procedures in place. However, refreshing these is crucial in ensuring contingency strategies are up to date and take into account the new operating environment of the business. The Ricardo eight-step business continuity process is an approach for conducting a BIA. Ricardo’s crisis management experts can support managers in the development of a BIA and in planning for recovery. RIPPLE EFFECTS Recovery, as with response, is not entirely in the hands of the business. Ongoing school closures, mandated social distancing and the closure of other businesses upon which staff rely, all impact the ability of businesses to begin planning recovery. Consider the pasta supply chain as an example: for the majority of UK supplies, wheat from Canada is shipped to Italy where it is turned into pasta. It is then shipped to the UK, transported to distribution centres and then sent to individual supermarkets. Disruption at any point in that chain can impact the recovery of manufacturers, distributors and supermarkets. Just as we are reliant on the relaxation of government control measures, we are also reliant on the recovery of our suppliers. This problem is exacerbated by the nature of today’s supply chains. Many are now ‘lean’, with just-in-time deliveries, which means organisations of all sizes are increasingly susceptible to even small disruptions in
HCB MONTHLY | MAY 2020
