There’s a big snowstorm/wildfire/flood/[your natural disaster here] headed your way. You need to alert and instruct all your employees immediatelyunnamed But there are 200 of them, and they work at 12 different sites, not counting the ones who are working remotely. How do you reach all of them quickly? Just as important, how do you get word back from each of them to let you know their status?
A group text message won’t do the job. Most phones limit the number of participants on a group chat to 10 or, at the most, 30. How about a texting version of an old-school phone tree? You text your management team, they text their direct reports, who text their direct reports. That is A LOT of room for human error in repeating the message correctly. It assumes every supervisor in the chain has all of their employees’ current phone numbers. It also assumes every member of the chain receives the message timely, that no one is simply away from their phone or has ringer turned off, and that everyone’s phone is working.
If you have more employees than you can easily and quickly send text messages to (i.e., more than 10), you should look into mass notification systems (MNS). These are software systems that enable you to simultaneously reach all of your employees with vital information and updates. Many enable your employees to reach back to you with status reports and questions.
There are many systems to choose from. If you do a Google search, nearly half of your first page of results will be ads. Finding the right one for your business is much more challenging. Sorting through all the options is something Make It Happen can help with.
A few of the features you will want to look for:
Multiple means of communication. Having been through several emergencies that impacted communications systems, I have learned that which systems will be operating in an infrastructure-damaging emergency is unpredictable. It’s generally thought that texting is the system that works best in emergencies. But I had days during disasters where I could communicate by email but not by text. Look for a system that does not rely completely on a single mode of communication.
Two-way communication. Particularly if you have multiple locations or employees who are working remotely, you want a system where employees can communicate back to you to report whether they are safe and what they need. Not all emergencies happen during business hours, so you may need people to reach back to you when they are at home.
Makes sense for your workforce. If all of your employees are white collar, they probably all have smartphones and an app-based system will work fine. But if you have a lot of low-wage workers, not all of them can afford smartphones. So a system that can reach employees via a recorded phone call may be important.
Integration with other emergency systems. If you’re getting serious enough about emergency preparedness to be considering a mass notification system, you may also be looking at other preparedness systems such as business continuity planning (BCP) and emergency response planning (ERP). It may make sense to choose a vendor who integrates all of these functions. But be sure to assess the quality of each function. A vendor might have a really great BCP function coupled with a half-baked MNS. It’s more important that the system you need most be high-quality than that all of your emergency-related systems are integrated. You may need to pay a bit more to subscribe to a few different vendors to get the right quality of the functions you need most. Emergencies can be life-or-death situations. Saving lives is important than saving money.
Pricing on MNSs seems structured to prevent comparisons. Some are priced by the message, others by number of users. One may look like a bargain ($3.40 per user per year!) until you notice that there is a minimum of 1,000 users. You don’t need to get mired in those details; tell us what benefits you want and we can do the research for you. We priced a system for 200 employees at multiple locations with multiple communications channels and two-way communications. The price range went from $500 to over $7,000 per year.
A mass notification system is one of the most high-value investments you can make in protecting your people and being able to reopen fast. We open fast is the name of the game for business survival after emergency: FEMA finds that, of smaller businesses forced to close by a disaster, 90% fail within a year unless they reopen within five days.
Schedule a complimentary preparedness strategy session with us to see how we can help your business build resilience.
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