You’ve told your boss that you’ve created an Emergency Action Plan compliant with OSHA, your state’s fire code and NFPA standards. Your boss then snaps, “How do you know any of that will work? Prove to me you have covered my posterior!”
Crude, but the right question. How do you prove your EAP will actually work?
Conduct a tabletop exercise (TTX). This is an exercise in your conference room for half a day with all the decision-makers in play. A Facilitator injects various emergency scenarios to ask decision-makers how they would respond. And to do so in minutes. A skilled Facilitator trained to conduct TTXs will put all decision-makers in the moment to test if they were listening during their planning and training on how to respond. Candidate injects could include everything from a heart attack to a fire to an active shooter to a tornado.
There are outstanding advantages to your conduct of a TTX at your workplace to assess the quality of:
- Your organization’s mandatory Emergency Response Team.
- Your decision-makers are suddenly injected into a real emergency.
- Your command, control, and communications are used in minutes to save the lives of your personnel.
- Your planned procedures
- Your employee training
A successful TTX does not say, “We all performed beautifully.” On the contrary, a successful report to management says, “We made a lot of mistakes and discovered some decision-makers are not up to this. We are correcting these deficiencies. We are correcting these mistakes in a conference room before the emergency, not during the emergency.”
A bonus advantage to conducting a TTX is that this will serve as an audit program. Your directors and senior management audit all sorts of programs. Here’s an opportunity to audit your organization’s most important program: Management’s duty of care to keep all personnel safe and secure.
So, treat this audit just like your financial audits. You would never use an insider to audit your books. Same with a TTX Facilitator. Never use one of your own people to conduct a TTX. Instead, employ an outside expert impervious to your internal politics and command influence. Inside audits are dismissed in court. Trained Facilitators are honored at court.
FEMA trains Facilitators in a 24-hour (three-day) course. This agency can connect you with a trained Facilitator anywhere in America.
Emergency Insight: A plan without exercise has no muscle.
Exercise your emergency planning and training to build the muscle that will save the lives of your personnel when an emergency strikes your workplace.
Good leaders protect their people.
