Business Continuity

Obviously this pandemic is giving concern on multiple fronts, and alongside the practicality of getting people working remotely to reduce the spread, we recognised the need to have plans in place for if a team member is unable to work for several weeks.

As I was running around getting the WFH planning in place, my co-director Laura and our MD designate Alice took on the creation of a Work Continuity Plan.

This is an internal document (sorry not to share it) that outlines the changes needed to our day-to-day working to enable instant handovers when someone becomes sick.

The primary things that our Work Continuity Plan aims to achieve are:

1. 1. All members of a clients’ Primary team are kept up to date with each other’s work so that if someone is ill, someone else can be briefed

   2. We have back up solutions for each role in the business should someone become ill, so that work can transition to someone else smoothly

The update to our general ways of working involves revisiting our daily record-keeping protocol, so that if someone has to jump into a campaign they haven’t seen before they have all the information they need.

We know that people are likely to have symptoms first, before being incapacitated, but we wanted to have measures in place as though a handover is not possible. These measures include an audit of task descriptions in our internal workflow management system, so that it’s easy for others to pick them up

Beyond that, there is a plan for each role in the business with guidance on:

• What they should start doing right now

• What to do if they get sick

  • Immediate actions for the person to take (if possible)

  • Step-by-step actions for who does what to ensure their work is reacllocated, and the client is contacted with an update

Again, it will be a living document that we proactively keep updated.