SIR – The tragic events of THURSDAY 7 JULY in London should make all Human Resources (HR) managers think carefully about how prepared their business is for such occurrences. There have been some excellent examples of crisis management by organisations that made alternative travel arrangements for employees to travel home.

Similarly, there will have been some immediate help, support and counselling for people more directly involved, but how long will it take for life to return to normal, and for people to settle back into the routine of commuting? Probably not long, based on the 9/11 experience in New York.

Yet this should be taken as a serious warning of the vulnerability of employers to major disruptions in the current pattern of work. Most organisations rely on their employees to travel in to the workplace to perform their job. A one-off incident like the London bombs causes chaos for 24 hours and then things settle down, but a more protracted disaster could mean that the entire tube and bus networks are out of action for weeks. Even if people found a way to get to work there would be a major loss of productivity which could be fatal for some businesses.

Most large companies have some sort of disaster recovery plan in place for, say, their IT and data systems. Where is the equivalent HR disaster plan, though? If people cannot get to work and the ’phone system in their office has been cut off, what should they do?

On a daily basis, thousands of ‘information workers’ commute into London to sit at an office desk and ‘talk’ to the rest of the world via e-mail and the telephone. With the right technology they can equally well do this from home or another remote location. So the provision of remote working facilities should be a major part of the disaster recovery plan for all employees, not just a provision for a few flexible workers.

This then inevitably raises the question of why – in the 21st Century – do we have people suffering the discomfort, stress and danger of commuting? If work can be carried out remotely, why do we have the famous ‘rush hours’ at all? The answer to this is that we are still stuck in work patterns left over from The Industrial Age, when there was no choice but to have people co-located to perform their job functions. Now that we are in The Information Age, it is high time that the HR function challenged some of the old habits.

If there is any good to come from the tragedy of the London bombs, can the HR function please see it as a challenge to conventional thinking about the way we work?

Already, many organisations have introduced flexible work patterns such as the nine-day fortnight which help to reduce the hassle of commuting. Generally, such measures have been instigated as part of a work/life balance programme, or in response to a request from an employee under current employment legislation. Employers are beginning to be driven by the overriding need to attract and retain skilled staff, and be seen as ‘employers of choice’.

Maybe now they can add the need to keep the business running through a disaster and be ‘employers of resilience’ as well.

Peter Thomson, Director of the Future Work Forum, Henley Management College

Source

SMT

Postscript

An excellent Letter To The Editor, Peter. Many thanks for writing to SMT.

Disaster recovery plans and policies are all important, perhaps now more so than at any time in the past.

Leading on from this, the UK is presently in the throes of a terrorist threat the like of which we have never experienced in the past, and it’s hugely important that members of staff – not to mention the public at large – are reminded of the need to be vigilant at all times.