Why Collaboration Works to Unify Communications
In the world of public safety and first responders, the importance of a comprehensive emergency management blueprint that includes a robust unified communications strategy cannot be understated. For public and private organizations, the mounting specter of destructive natural disasters ignited by climate change, in addition to the continued pandemic threats and potential social unrest in this country, has intensified the pressure for these groups to initiate their own unified communication frameworks to help protect employees and staff.
Securing an organization’s communication infrastructure is a crucial aspect of a unified communications plan considering the exponential growth of BYOD and IoT devices that have become even more crucial with the sizeable, displaced workforce created by COVID-19 since the outbreak of the virus in 2020. Establishing solutions that ensure resilience and sustainability can also help organizations better manage critical events that might negatively impact business continuity.
The elimination of corporate and government agency silos must be a collaborative effort when organizations work towards a common goal of unifying both emergency communications with CEM (critical event management) tools.
Prioritizing the importance of critical event communications and eliminating organizational silos that impede rapid and unified communication are the challenges that drive Ramon Pinero, the Vice President of Product and Services for BlackBerry AtHoc. According to Pinero, enterprises face an enormous spectrum of threats, from those that are human-caused, such as suspicious packages, cyberattacks and industrial accidents, to others that are natural, such as wildfires, hurricanes, and earthquakes. He asserts that to successfully respond to threats, an organization needs to share the right information with the right people at the right time, adding that there is a safety obligation and duty of care to their employees, and meeting those needs requires effective planning and response.
“When organizations start crunching the numbers and get to the bottom line, that's when the C-suite understands the issues. They realize that ( their business) can be more resilient, we can resolve situations quicker, and we can eliminate or avoid the revenue loss given the impact of this event if we just plan for these events in advance with CEM (critical event management) tools and better communication,” Pinero adds. “The bottom-line business argument convinced most executive managers to act. And then COVID happened.”
Pinero says that the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on business operations put an exclamation mark on everything that operations, risk, continuity and security managers had been discussing for years; in a time of crisis, how do you communicate with employees securely? And especially when everybody's working from home. How do you communicate the safety guidelines around COVID? What are the business expectations? And now that organizations are being migrated into a vaccine mandate phase in the United States, how does management communicate their policies and procedures with both in-house and remote workers to ensure compliance?
“If you're an organization of a hundred employees or more, then you're going to need to mandate vaccination. Now, how you do that, is not trivial. I'm not talking about a company of one hundred people, but let's say a company like Microsoft or a major U.S. airline that employs a 100,000, 200,000 or 300,000 people, how do you get that operation going? How do you enforce mandates? Having a unified communications strategy as well as the technology to achieve it is the only way companies will be able to comply,” admits Pinero.
The unpredictable nature of the current business environment has emphasized the value of the symbiotic connection between critical event communications and critical event management platforms. A proactive approach using advanced analytics ensures real-time organizational insights that allow business operations to thrive in times of crisis and could protect the security and safety of employees and stakeholders. The escalating challenges of a sustained pandemic, climate change, a shifting workforce and supply chain security are critical events that necessitate immediate solutions. More organizations – both public and private – are migrating to solutions like early warning systems and unified communication management tools safeguard operations and business continuity.
From a corporate standpoint, it can often be as much about shifting the cultural perspective of management as it is about specifying and implementing technology. Pinero contends that in some instances it is human resources, continuity and risk managers that become the initial champions of fortifying their organization’s internal emergency communications protocol, not the C-level executives.
