Save Your Company from Bird Flu:
101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic Flu

Bird Flu might never strike. But if it does, how well will your company withstand it? By planning now, and by making small changes in your operations and planned activities, you can actually gain market share if a pandemic event occurs.

Skip to the Details: How To Orderf — or maybe we should say when — a pandemic event occurs, whether from bird flu or another agent, how well will your company perform? What will happen to your operations if 15-35% of your employees (according to an estimate of the US Centers for Disease Control) either do not report for work or fall ill? What will happen to your company afterwards if 5% of your employees die or are permanently disabled?

The H5N1 virus (in gold). Photo credit: C. Goldsmith, J. Katz, and S. Zaki, US Centers for Disease Control.

Most businesses and government agencies have some form of operational continuity plan in place. The typical plan is more than eighteen months old, and it was designed for a natural disaster — a tornado, hurricane, earthquake or fire. Most operational continuity plans are either outmoded or inapplicable to pandemic events.

Organizations that deal with pandemic flu successfully will be those that have done more than produce a plan and file it away.

The three keys to organizational survival in a pandemic event
are continuous planning, periodic exercises, and making
pandemic awareness a part of normal operations.

Is your organization fully prepared for pandemic flu? Do you have new products scheduled for release in the next eighteen months? Have you considered what a pandemic event might do to your plans? Does your organization operate one or more centralized data centers? Do you know what will happen if one of those data centers is ordered closed by local health authorities? These are just some of this issues you might have to face if pandemic influenza develops, or if a pandemic emergency is declared. 101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic Flu gives you tips for planning for, managing and recovering from pandemic flu events.

What you'll learn

Read 101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic Flu to learn techniques for preparing for and managing pandemic incidents — tips and insights that could take you a lifetime to invent on your own. You'll learn, for example:

Novel approaches for adapting your facilities to make them pandemic-resistant
What aspects of your own operations to monitor during a pandemic event
What to anticipate in terms of legal consequences, from pandemic alert to pandemic aftermath, and how best to prepare for it
How to incorporate pandemic response planning into your marketing planning right now
What to do to minimize the impact of pandemic events on financing and financial planning
Devices and procedures you can put in place today that will make communications far more effective in a pandemic emergency

Who can benefit

This tips booklet addresses a broad readership:

Organizational leaders who want to guide sponsors and leaders of pandemic response planning teams within their organizations
Sponsors of pandemic response planning teams who want solid results faster
Leaders of pandemic response planning teams who want to adjust their approaches to the latest thinking about what to anticipate during each stage of the pandemic
Members of pandemic response planning teams who want to develop plans that will meet the needs of their organizations

What you do with it depends on your role in your organization. Here are just two ideas:

Organizational leaders: If you've chartered a pandemic response planning team, make sure the team lead sees a copy. Have a conversation about the comparison between what the team is producing and what kinds of suggestions you find in the booklet.
Leaders of pandemic response planning teams: Use the booklet as the basis for a conversation or brainstorming session. Explore those ideas that are good fits, and talk about how some others might be modified to fit your needs.

What's in this tips booklet

This booklet includes a range of suggestions for configuring your organization to survive, and even to thrive, in the pandemic environment. It's packed with tips and techniques for:

Developing a Strategy for Pandemic Flu
Making Your Facilities Pandemic-Resistant
Making Your Operations Pandemic-Resistant
What to Do When a Pandemic Is Declared
What to Do When the Pandemic Reaches Your Company or Facility
Planning for the Aftermath

And it's all packaged in a single, compact e-booklet. Load it onto your Acrobat-enabled PDA or laptop and carry it with you on your next trip.

Some sample tips

Here are some sample tips.

Document your planning efforts and preparation activities: If your facility is hit especially hard, the stricken and their survivors might feel that the organization and its management contributed in some way to the unusual incidence of disease in your facility. Legal action by those stricken, their survivors, shareholders, customers, vendors or neighbors might follow. Any defense against such action will be more effective if you've maintained a clear record of dedicated effort, management commitment, generous expenditure, and prudent action.
Consider rescheduling securities offerings: New offerings scheduled further out than the immediate future risk appearing in the midst of a pandemic event. Bring them closer in, or push them further out, recognizing that pushing them out will likely put you in a very long queue, if a pandemic materializes. Whether or not rescheduling seems like a good idea right now to you, it will seem so to some; those who act earliest will benefit the most.
Eliminate public pens: Eliminate the pen at building guest sign in, or anyplace where you now provide public pens. Let people use their own pens. If they need pens, give them pens to keep, or provide a drop slot for collecting pens after a single use, and then disinfect them before handing them out again.
Encourage people to use sick leave: The single policy change that will provide the most encouragement to people to actually stay home when they're sick is to increase the days of sick allowance, and to segregate sick leave from vacation and holiday time. In other words, eliminate the use of, or create a less favorable exchange rate for, the use of sick days as vacation time. Second best idea: do not pay for unused sick days in the event of termination or retirement, and don't let them accumulate indefinitely. Cap their accumulation, or let them expire after a decent period.

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Have a Strategy for Pandemic Flu

Understand what a pandemic is
Have a pandemic response plan
Set appropriate goals
Document your planning efforts and preparation activities
Establish an advisory review board for public statements
Know WHO's six phases of pandemic response
Establish a pandemic reserve
Assume that vaccines will be unavailable
Plan for border closures and quarantines
Plan not only for business continuity, but for business discontinuity
Intentionally choose to operate less profitably
Defer relocations that are intended to unite dispersed facilities
Monitor employee rights
Suspend your JIT inventory strategy
Defer image realignment
Consider rescheduling securities offerings
Consider rescheduling new product offerings
Encourage people to use sick leave
Prepare emergency facilities
Cooperate with other facilities
Cooperate with local authorities
Document, document, document
Offer home preparedness training
Exploit opportunities for seasonal facilities
Suspend some projects now
Include the pandemic in project risk plans
Devise a plan for urgent suspension of projects
Drill, drill, drill
Know the risks of communications trees
Re-establish contact with retired or former employees
Favor solo decision makers over committees
Designate roles by code name
Create communication infrastructure for code names
Report dead birds

Make Your Facilities Pandemic-Resistant

Install excess data center capacity
Suspend self-service food stations
Eliminate public pens
Eliminate bird attractors
Upgrade bird guards
Inspect bird guards weekly
Increase use of fresh air
Use the overnight to purge used air
Upgrade the air filtration system
Increase the refresh rate in elevators
Use touchless elevator controls
Use no-contact or low-contact access control technology
Install thermal scanners
Use motion sensors to actuate outside doors
Use touchless technologies in lavatories

Make Your Operations Pandemic-Resistant

Review supplier agreements
Reconfigure your supply chain
Anticipate absenteeism
Encourage telecommuting
Replace meetings with conference calls
Expand network capacity
Expand facility telephone capacity
Set priorities for telecommuting and telemeetings
Prepare to seal some facilities
Replace scheduled air services with private services
Replace air travel with virtual travel
Educate employees about disease transmission
Ask air travelers to request fresh gloves
Advise travelers to carry medical kits
Encourage employees to shop on-line
Wave, smile and nod
Treat coming to work sick as a performance issue
Ensure access to critical documents
Ensure access to necessary contact information
Increase cash and currency reserves
Increase staff reserves
Increase inventories of critical supplies
Review succession planning
Renew passports

When a Pandemic Is Declared

Have an alternate transport plan
Have a multi-stage response plan
Escalate standards in food service safety
Seal pre-designated facilities
Invoke pandemic clauses in cleaning services contracts
Stagger shifts
Stagger lunchtimes
Encourage people to eat lunch at their desks or outside
Encourage employees to avoid public transport
Recognize that the virus will likely target demographic groups selectively
Defer face-to-face training in non-critical topics
Advise employees to defer family gatherings
Advise employees to defer routine medical treatment
Encourage employees to defer vacations
Consider defenses against intentional infection

When the Pandemic Reaches Your Company or Facility

Have flexible leave policies
Plan for grief counseling
Suspend non-critical activities
Monitor waste management
Ensure graceful power-up and power-down
Consider offering expertise and labor to local authorities
Have a procedure for dealing with employees who become ill at work
Announce deaths in batches

Plan for the Aftermath

Anticipate an increase in customer service load
Assume that you'll be one of the few left standing
Plan for a spike in load on your legal offices
Remember the fallen
Recognize heroic efforts

How to order

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