Disaster Recovery—People, Not Data

Can you prepare your workforce for when tragedy strikes?

Most businesses have plans for what to do when something bad happens to their data. But what about when something bad happens to their people?

In the wake of work accidents, airplane crashes or natural disasters, employee survivors and their families need a broad range of services. Outsourced employee assistance programs (EAPs) offer counseling, but they focus on long-term mental health rather than emergency intervention. In the immediate aftermath, employees or family members may be so tangled in trauma that the simplest of tasks—who to call, where to go, how to get there, what to say to the media—may be incapacitating.

“Family members usually need to get somewhere to be with people, but they’re in shock and they don’t even know how to start,” says Carolyn Coarsey, founder of the Family Assistance Foundation. The foundation is a nonprofit organization that trains employee volunteer “care teams,” which fill the void of assistance and compassion after tragedies, injuries and other traumatic events. Care teams support survivors, handle family logistics, communicate with traumatized people and handle media inquiries.

“They don’t try to be counselors or anything other than a good employee who is empowered to offer options,” Coarsey says.

This assistance is particularly important when an employee is injured or killed on company business because survivors may blame the employer. Lawsuits can ensue, employee morale can dive and the company’s reputation can suffer.

Coarsey’s foundation has a reserve of trained care teams that it deploys to member organizations. But she says she prefers to train organizations to respond to their own traumatic events. After all, compassionate coworkers have an affiliation that makes them a more familiar, comforting presence than an outsourced service, and the benefits to the company range from financial to psychological.

“When the company does a good job, it really causes—aside from the claims reduction—a cultural shift in that company,” Coarsey says. “I can’t tell you how many employees say, ‘I never knew what a great company I worked for until I helped this family because I know they’ll be there for us, too.’”

Whether the people needing assistance are employees or customers, not responding can add further disaster. Consider the case of Schindler Elevators. In 2006, a Japanese teenager died in an accident in a Schindler elevator. The company failed to issue an apology, despite not accepting direct blame. Its sales in Japan evaporated completely.

Coarsey offers four steps to establishing volunteer care teams.

1. Get buy-in from the top.
Hammer the financial bottom line and the HR benefits. Coarsey says a number of her clients have cited a reduction in lawsuits as one benefit. Plus, a traumatic event that can prompt existential questions in survivors’ minds, they may be more likely to see meaning in staying with a company that takes care of its people.

“When a crisis occurs, it’s a real way to show people who you really are,” Coarsey says.

2. Identify an infrastructure.
Coarsey recommends designating HR, operations or another group to lead the team. “Identify some manager who can have part of their job description saying that in the event of a tragedy, this is someone who can pull people off their jobs and assign families to work with,” she says.

3. Recruit volunteers.
Find people willing to help coworkers if something tragic happens. Coarsey says this is often the easy part; there’s rarely a shortage of people who want to help.

4. Train the team.
Coarsey’s foundation can provide in-person training, or organizations can design their own trainings. Coarsey’s Handbook for Human Services Response is a good guide.

5. Remember why you’re doing it.
“In terms of employee commitment and cultural norms, a company is smart to establish a norm that says ‘we care about you and we’re going to give you the power to go out and help people.’”