The research found that a large percentage of organizations have an emergency communication plan, and that it is used across multiple departments. However, it also indicates that organizations take too long to implement their plans, need to be prepared to incorporate traveling and mobile employees and are far less prepared to handle location-based incidents, such as workplace violence and terrorism, where knowing which employees are in, or near, a place of danger is critical.
Some key findings include:
Key Finding: The majority of organizations have an emergency communication plan, and use it across departments:
- 84 percent of organizations report having an emergency communications plan.
- Plans are used across departments and the most common triggers for emergency communications are unplanned IT and telecommunication outages (42 percent), power outages (40 percent), adverse weather (39 percent), facilities management incidents (23 percent), cybersecurity incidents (22 percent) and natural disasters (22 percent).
Key Finding: Employees are less likely to be confined to a single physical location – and critical event management plans need to reflect this growing reality:
- 1 out of 3 organizations (32 percent) have more than 100 employees who travel internationally.
- 32 percent of organizations have staff traveling in “high risk” areas of the world.
Key Finding: Over 60 percent of businesses are not prepared for location-specific events, such as workplace violence or terrorism:
- 30 percent have no communications plan in place to communicate with employees during workplace violence or terrorism.
- 56 percent are not confident in their preparation for workplace violence or terrorist incidents, and only 6 percent are “very much prepared.”
- 65 percent felt that simply locating people who may be in an impacted building was their biggest challenge in a workplace violence or terrorism situation; 76 percent indicated that the ability to communicate with those people and confirm their safety was a major concern.
Key Finding: Businesses are not fully prepared to facilitate communications during crisis situations:
- 29 percent do not have emergency/crisis communications training and education programs.
- It takes too long for organizations to respond to an incident even though speed is critical in many types of incidents. 26 percent of organizations said it takes more than 30 minutes to activate their emergency communications plan; 12 percent take an hour or more. Only 24 percent activate their plan in less than 5 minutes.
- Of the 16 percent of organizations that do not have an emergency communications plan, 64 percent said they would only consider putting a plan in place after a business-affecting event.
Key Finding: Organizations utilize multiple communication channels to improve the reliability of getting information to employees:
- More than half of organizations (55 percent) use three or more methods to communicate with employees during an incident. Email and text messaging are the two most common modes; 56 percent said they still use manual call trees.
“This year, our findings revealed that global businesses are increasingly aware that an effective emergency communication strategy is critical to ensuring business resiliency and the safety of all staff – from lone workers, to executive travelers, to high risk areas,” said Imad Mouline, CTO, Everbridge. “While it’s not surprising to see shared interest in emergency communications across business continuity, IT, security, facilities and other disciplines, it’s clear that organizations are still seeking solutions to optimize their critical event management and response plans for the mobile workforce and to adapt to the growing complexity of business operations and security incidents.”
A copy of the research report is available here:
https://go.everbridge.com/BCIReport2017_RegistrationPage.html
Please also join Owen Miles, Managing Consultant from Everbridge, and Patrick Alcantara DBCI, Senior Research Associate at the BCI, for a webinar that will discuss the research findings and share additional best practices for critical communications. Register here:
https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/1476/238313
About Everbridge
Everbridge, Inc. (NASDAQ: EVBG), is a global software company that provides critical communications and enterprise safety applications that enable customers to automate and accelerate the process of keeping people safe and businesses running during critical events. During public safety threats such as active shooter situations, terrorist attacks or severe weather conditions, as well as critical business events such as IT outages or cyber incidents, over 3,000 global customers rely on the company’s SaaS-based platform to quickly and reliably construct and deliver contextual notifications to millions of people at one time. The company’s platform sent over 1 billion messages in 2015, and offers the ability to reach more than 200 countries and territories with secure delivery to over 100 different communication devices. The company’s critical communications and enterprise safety applications include Mass Notification, Incident Management, IT Alerting™, Safety Connection™, Community Engagement™, Secure Messaging and Internet of Things, and are easy-to-use and deploy, secure, highly scalable and reliable. Everbridge serves 8 of the 10 largest U.S. cities, 8 of the 10 largest U.S.-based investment banks, all four of the largest global accounting firms, 24 of the 25 busiest North American airports and 6 of the 10 largest global automakers. Everbridge is based in Boston and Los Angeles with additional offices in San Francisco, Beijing and London. For more information, visit
www.everbridge.com, read the company blog,
https://www.everbridge.com/blog, and follow on
Twitter and
Facebook.
About the Business Continuity Institute
Founded in 1994 with the aim of promoting a more resilient world, the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) has established itself as the world’s leading Institute for business continuity and resilience. The BCI has become the membership and certifying organization of choice for business continuity and resilience professionals globally with over 8,000 members in more than 100 countries, working in an estimated 3,000 organizations in the private, public and third sectors.
The vast experience of the Institute’s broad membership and partner network is built into its world class education, continuing professional development and networking activities. Every year, more than 1,500 people choose BCI training, with options ranging from short awareness raising tools to a full academic qualification, available online and in a classroom. The Institute stands for excellence in the resilience profession and its globally recognized Certified grades provide assurance of technical and professional competency. The BCI offers a wide range of resources for professionals seeking to raise their organization’s level of resilience, and its extensive thought leadership and research programme helps drive the industry forward. With approximately 120 Partners worldwide, the BCI Partnership offers organizations the opportunity to work with the BCI in promoting best practice in business continuity and resilience.
The BCI welcomes everyone with an interest in building resilient organizations from newcomers, experienced professionals and organizations. Further information about the BCI is available at
www.thebci.org.
