How to Create

an Emergency Response
Plan
MICHAEL HERRERA
POSTED ON:JANUARY 12, 2023
UPDATED ON:FEBRUARY 16, 2023

Due to the rise in work-from-home, the last few years have seen a serious
degradation in organizations’ emergency planning and response capability. In
today’s post, we’ll look at why it’s important to have a solid emergency response
plan and explain how to create one. 
 Related on BCMMETRICS: “This Is an Emergency”: Why You Should
Consider an Emergency Notification System

A Victim of Neglect 
The emergency response plan—the plan that guides employees on what to do in
the immediate aftermath of an emergency’s being detected—is something that
has been unwisely neglected in recent years. 

This type of plan, whose goal is protecting life safety and which addresses such
matters as evacuation, sheltering, and lockdown, was thought by many
executives to be not worth bothering about in a period when few employees
were working at the office. 

As a result, updates, testing, and distribution ceased and many companies’

plans gathered dust and became obsolescent. 

The initial neglect was perhaps understandable in a period when everyone was
trying to figure out COVID and work-from-home. However, the logic behind it
was always faulty (just because fewer people are in the office doesn’t mean you
can be careless with their safety). And with more people going back to work,
even the previous slim justification for not having an up-to-date emergency
response plan has evaporated. 

Creating an Emergency Response Plan 

Every organization needs to develop, implement, communicate, and test an
emergency response plan to protect its employees in the event of an
emergency such as a fire, flood, tornado, structural collapse, or active shooter
incident. 

OSHA will expect no less. And if something happens and they investigate and
find less, the organization can be open to massive liability. 

Creating or updating an emergency response plan is straightforward. The

process can be divided into the following four steps: 

1. Create a team to create the plan. The first step is to identify the people
who will take the lead in developing or updating your plan. It’s important to
get the right SMEs (subject matter experts) involved. Look for
 knowledgeable, effective people from the corporate security, business
continuity, human resources, and communications departments, among
others. Eventually, you might also form a team of employee volunteers to
act as floor wardens or fire wardens. 

2. Look at the threats facing each facility. For each facility, the team should
make a list of the potential threats, then identify the five to seven threats
that are most likely to occur. For organizations with multiple facilities, each
needs a custom-tailored plan. Threats differ widely based on location.
Threats to consider might include: tornado, earthquake, hurricane, fire,
flood, snowstorm, strike, chemical spill from a neighboring plant, incident of
workplace violence, or incident of political unrest. 

3. Develop and write the emergency response plan. Once the team has
identified the most likely threats to a facility, it can set about devising the
actions that will be taken in the event of each threat occurring. The plan
should answer the question, “How are we going to deal with each of these
events?” and cover detection, notification, evacuation, and relocation. Plans
should be in checklist form, avoiding lengthy explanations. OSHA, FEMA, and
the Department of Homeland Security all have excellent resources to help
with writing an emergency response plan. 

4. Communicate, train on, and test the plan. The last step involves sharing
the plan with the people who will need to use it, training them on it, and
testing it. Keep your plan simple. A one-page checklist is best. It should say,
“Here’s what you should do and who you should call if something happens.”
The plan should be exercised twice a year using a different scenario each
time. Such exercises might involve a partial or full evacuation of the facility. 

Following these steps will leave your organization with an up-to-date, widely
known, and proven emergency response plan for each of its facilities.  

Protecting Employees’ Health and Safety 

The rise of work-of-home brought about by the COVID pandemic had the
unfortunate effect of causing companies to neglect their emergency response
plans. It’s high time for organizations to create or update a solid emergency
response plan for every one of their facilities.  

Creating such a plan is a straightforward matter of following the steps laid out
above. Having one will go a long way toward protecting the health and safety of
the employees in the event of an emergency. 
Further Reading 
For more information on emergency response planning and other hot topics in
BCM and IT/disaster recovery, check out these recent posts from BCMMETRICS
and MHA Consulting: 

Practice Makes Perfect: How to Be Ready to Handle an Emergency 

After the Smoke Clears: 7 Things to Do Once an Emergency Is Over 
The 6 Tasks Every Emergency Plan Should Address 
“This Is an Emergency”: Why You Should Consider an Emergency Notification
System 
Don’t Give Up the Ship: Demonstrating the Benefits of Rigorous Crisis
Management Training 

Michael Herrera
 Michael Herrera is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of MHA. In his role, Michael
provides global leadership to the entire set of industry practices and horizontal
capabilities within MHA. Under his leadership, MHA has become a leading
provider of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery services to
organizations on a global level. He is also the founder of BCMMETRICS, a leading
cloud based tool designed to assess business continuity compliance and
residual risk. Michael is a well-known and sought after speaker on Business
Continuity issues at local and national contingency planner chapter meetings
and conferences. Prior to founding MHA, he was a Regional VP for Bank of
America, where he was responsible for Business Continuity across the
southwest region.

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