Chaco Canyon Consulting

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 OrderIf — 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)
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's on this page

What you'll learn

101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic FluRead 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.

Table of contents

Click the folder icons to reveal (or hide) chapter content summaries.

Reveal all chapter content summaries.Reveal all chapter content summaries.

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

This item requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 or later or Adobe Acrobat 5.0 or later. You can load it onto your computer or PDA. Or print it on any standard black-and-white or color printer. Price: per copy. Quantity packs are available at the prices shown below. Call for site license pricing at the phone number below.

Order "101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic Flu" by credit card, for each, using our secure server, and receive download instructions by return email.

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This item is also available in a 10-pack (USD 249.95 per pack, or USD 24.99 per copy):

Order "101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic Flu, 10-pack" by credit card, for USD 24.99 each, using our secure server, and receive download instructions by return email.
Or if you prefer, you can order through Google Checkout.

Or as a 50-pack (USD 999.00 per pack, or USD 19.98 per copy):

Order "101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic Flu, 50-pack" by credit card, for USD 19.98 each, using our secure server, and receive download instructions by return email.
Or if you prefer, you can order through Google Checkout.

Or as a 100-pack (USD 1,695.00 per pack, or USD 16.95 per copy):

Order "101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic Flu, 100-pack" by credit card, for USD 16.95 each, using our secure server, and receive download instructions by return email.
Or if you prefer, you can order through Google Checkout.

Or as a 500-pack (USD 6,995.00 per pack, or USD 13.99 per copy):

Order "101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic Flu, 500-pack" by credit card, for USD 13.99 each, using our secure server, and receive download instructions by return email.
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