When employers develop/update their Emergency Action Plans, executives like you spend a lot of time carefully wording the details of policies and procedures regarding each emergency that impacts your employees’ safety. That’s necessary. But what about Command, Control and Communications (CCC)?
Over the decades that I have advised employers, I can report that there are thousands of workplaces that believe the only thing they need to do is write an emergency procedure—and then call 911.
“What’s the big deal? When we have an emergency, we call 911, isn’t that right?” Let me remind you of an axiom my Drill Sergeant taught me in the U.S. Army. “For every complex problem, there’s a simple solution that’s always wrong.”
The Problem:
The FBI and NYPD have researched active shooters. Most of these incidents last four minutes. The 4 Minute Rule started with medical emergencies. If one of your employees goes down with a heart attack, stroke, or blackout, you have four minutes to apply medical treatment, after which your employee’s chances of survival plummet. Turns out the 4-Minute Rule applies to fire, bomb threat, explosion, assault, bullying, active shooter and every emergency.
In my research nationally, it takes six to 20 minutes for the police to arrive when any employer anywhere dials 911. Thus, police, fire and EMT officers are not the first responders. These immutable physics mean that your employees are the first responders.
What have you done to CCC before the police arrive for the six-20 minutes your employees are on their own? Even when that police officer arrives, that officer will, alone, go to the tactical situation. What have you done to organize employees who are not directly engaged in that workplace emergency, not only during the six to 20 minutes before police arrive, but in the many minutes or hours after that officer has arrived?
Dialing 911 is only the start of CCC for any workplace emergency. Dialing 911 alone does not organize employee response. Every workplace—by law—shall organize employees into an Emergency Response Team (ERT), appointing commanders, searchers, and buddies for the mobility-challenged. Then train your ERT members on how to direct all your personnel to run, hide, fight, evacuate, in-building relocate, shelter in place, move to assembly areas, lockdown, lockout, and conduct the headcount, among other duties.
The only way your ERT will operate successfully is in their smart and immediate use of CCC.
Understand that the Life Safety Code in your Fire Code and OSHA regs (29 CFR 1910.165) both require that you, as the employer, shall install and shall use communications systems to alarm and alert 100% of your personnel at the beginning of any emergency and throughout that emergency.
So, what communications platforms are available to you?
Each of these has pros and cons. Each of these will have limits in their reach and scope of their communication. Yet you are required—you need—to be able to CCC 100% of your personnel in a four-minute world. Thus, I recommend to my clients that they deploy all of those communications platforms simultaneously. My clients often respond that I should switch to decaf. My wisdom in return: when it comes to the life safety of your personnel, redundancy is a beautiful thing. Redundancy is a beautiful thing.
I hope you have written an all-hazards Emergency Action Plan, as the law everywhere requires. Now that you have carefully worded policies and procedures for all kinds of emergencies, raise your game to a professional level by structuring a skilled ERT and training them in Command, Control and Communications to survive the inevitable emergency coming your way.
