Flexible Work and Disaster Planning: Dancing with New Partners
Featured Guest Blogger September 21st, 2009
Sandy Burud, Ph.D., is a researcher, consultant and author on human capital and work-life. She is the Chief Strategy Officer for FlexPaths, a flexibility-focused software platform for employers and employment portal for individuals. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.
If we are to see truly flexible workplaces anytime soon, it’s important that we get beyond our own circles and collaborate with new partners whose interests align with ours. I’d like to see us pay more attention to business continuity planners.
It’s easy to superficially add ‘business continuity’ to the list of advantages brought by flexible workplaces — businesses can continue operating in an emergency if teams are skilled at flexible work. But as I read more deeply about it, I find some gems that make my eyes pop out. One in five US businesses suffers a disaster that causes it to cease operations for a time. Of course there are the big ones — earthquakes, tornadoes, horrific man-made disasters, but did you know the scale? Seventy-five of them in 2008, says FEMA. And, 43% of companies that go through a severe crisis never open their doors again; another 29% fail within 2 years. Add to that the day-to-day, basement-flooding variety that may not put a company out of business but still throws a big kink into productivity, and it’s clear why disaster plans need to be taken seriously.
Disaster plans typically involve paying to reserve alternative space in which to operate in the event of a disaster. Ah, but if people are already equipped, trained, and comfortable working from home or some alternate workplace (that serves lattes), it means those costs are avoided and can be added to the plus column of direct savings (aka ‘hard dollars’) from flexible work. Put that in your flexibility ROI analysis! I certainly added it to our white paper on the business case for workplace flexibility public policies: Flexible Work: In Whose Best Interest?
The real kicker, though, is this: we proponents of flexibility struggle to get businesses to ‘offer’ flex. As disaster planners see that teams who can work on the spur of the moment from anywhere, anytime can literally save the business, the disaster planners have begun to do something we have not. They have begun to require (yes, I said ‘require’) that teams (individuals, managers, and executives) practice working flexibly on a regular basis. Otherwise, the reasoning goes, people will not remember the access codes, know the tricks for sharing documents, etc. — all the things that are critical to smoothly functioning in an emergency.
When the disaster planning team says, ‘you will do this’….everyone listens. Now that’s a partner.
Gogodancing
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