Business continuity means having contingency plans in place so that your business can function during times of disruption. These can include natural disasters, occurrences of human error, product recalls, terrorist threats or other threats. For small businesses, in particular, even the loss of an important supplier, or a few key customers may highlight the value of business continuity planning.
You might need to develop or revise your plans when you consider the implications of a pandemic. A pandemic will not be a short, sharp, localised disruption, like most disasters. It will be widespread and may last for several months. Current predictions suggest that between 30 and 50 per cent of the workforce might be unavailable at the peak of the pandemic, and there might be a second or third wave of absenteeism as more people become ill.
If you provide key services for the community or other businesses, it is important that you are able to continue to deliver these. Emergency management and overall national recovery will be greatly facilitated if such services are available without significant interruption, during a pandemic.
For businesses that do not provide key services, you might like to plan for how you could best cope if you were to scale down your operations or close during a pandemic (this is the worst case scenario for businesses and many businesses may continue to operate).
Developing a business continuity plan will help you to act quickly when a pandemic hits and should assist you to recover quickly as well.
Businesses may also benefit from viewing pandemic planning as an opportunity to review their overall business processes and look at opportunities to develop more robust business systems taking into account all types of disruptions they could face. By incorporating pandemic planning into your overall business continuity plan you may be able to improve your business processes.
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