How to make A Business Continuity Plan for COVID-19?

The COVID-19 pandemic has struck every major country around the globe. To flatten the coronavirus growth curve, governments around the world have imposed partial or total lockdowns in their cities and state. These unfavorable conditions have made running businesses a challenging task.

Companies have to take a proactive and predictive role to maintain business continuity. However, a study has revealed that around 73 percent of companies are not prepared for disaster recovery.

COVID-19 is testing businesses and how well they can perform under stressful conditions. If your company hasn’t formulated any business continuity plan, then you would already have realized its importance till now. However, it is never too late, and you can still prepare for an efficient strategy to ensure the flow of critical operations with minimal to zero disruptions.

In this article, we will discuss how you can prepare a business continuity plan for your organization, which you can implement during the COVID-19 crisis and pandemics in the future.

We will discuss How To Make A Business Continuity Plan

1. Put your employees first

While drafting a business continuity or contingency plan, you should put your employees first as their health safety is critical for your business to run essential services without any disruptions.

Ask your employees to curb the spread by following all the precautionary measures such as regularly washing their hands, covering faces with masks, etc.

Along with that, you should facilitate working from home for your employees. You should follow the best practices to implement work from home.

Communication is the most crucial aspect of running business services in a hassle-free manner. Your employees should feel connected while working from home, and it is equally essential to deliver continued customer support services.

For implementing robust, secure, and flexible communication solutions, you can use cloud solutions. There are numerous benefits of cloud communication solutions that can help you to implement your business continuity plans.
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2. Identify critical services and service level agreements

The ultimate goal of a good business continuity plan is to ensure that critical services keep running during any pandemic or unfavorable situations when a significant portion of your workforce is not available.

Critical services can be defined as a set of time-bound operations or activities which may lead to business failure if not performed.

During this COVID-19 pandemic, you have to identify such critical services for your business and makeshift in policies to ensure smooth operations of these vital services.

Additionally, there might be services that you need to perform to meet the regulatory requirements.

For these types of services, you should take a legal and organizational point of view. In case there are any legal limitations, then you should include them in your action plan.

3. Analyze staffing requirements

The next step includes analyzing the staffing requirements for those identified critical services. Classify your employees based on various skill set levels and their dependencies on your critical operations. Maintain data that can help you at the time of the reallocation of resources across the organization.

4. Make an extensive plan of action

Prepare a plan of action that should have the details on how you will maintain the critical services during the coronavirus pandemic. Document the plan of work during the planning process, and it should include the following information:

• Critical services that have to be maintained.
• Key staff to keep running these essential business operations.
• Legal requirements and service level agreements.
• Communication strategy for your employees and company stakeholders.
• Reporting information about service operations to top-level management.
• Remote work monitoring system.
• Decision-making process during the COVID-19 pandemic.

5. Documenting your business continuity plan

The final step in drafting your business continuity plan is to document your decisions and plan of action. This step should be done only when:

– You have identified business-critical services.

– Issues that might occur when service level agreements are changed.

– You have identified action plans for essential business services.

6. Testing and improvisations

Now, circulate your business continuity plan within your organization for information and training purposes. Conduct an annual emergency practice of your business continuity plans to see how it works. Identify any loopholes and improvise your business continuity plans accordingly to handle pandemics in the future.
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Wrapping Up

COVID-19 pandemic has alerted companies around the world to have business continuity plans. A well-planned business continuity plan will ensure that your business keeps running smoothly and mitigate economic losses.

Himanshu Tyagi

I am a technical content writer at The Real PBX who loves to learn new technologies such as cloud communications and write about them. While not working, I do a bit of Python coding.

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