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Associated Press
3 days ago
- Business
- Associated Press
What Comes After the Storm: Compassionate Recovery and Business Resilience Strategies
When disaster strikes, preparedness often takes center stage, but what happens after the crisis passes? Recovering from a disruptive event is more than restoring power or reopening your doors. It's about caring for your people, rebuilding operations, and creating lasting resilience for the future. In our recent webinar, 'Disaster Recovery & Resilience: What to Do After the Crisis,' Antea Group experts Alizabeth Aramowicz Smith, Environment, Health & Safety Practice Leader; Tracy Taszarek, Senior Consultant; and John Ruksenas, Senior Manager; led a powerful discussion exploring recovery strategies through the lens of Human and Organizational Performance (HOP), business continuity planning, and trauma-informed leadership. Below are four essential takeaways to help your organization not only recover but grow stronger after a crisis. Find the full webinar here: Watch On-Demand 1. Rethink Investigations with HOP Principles In the wake of disaster, organizations are under pressure to respond quickly, especially when incidents involve injuries or operational breakdowns. Traditional investigation tools like the Five Whys often miss the bigger picture, leading to oversimplified conclusions and misplaced blame. Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) reframes how we investigate. It encourages us to understand why an employee made a decision based on their environment and pressures, rather than assuming they failed to follow procedure. An example discussed during the webinar shared how HOP-enabled interviews, conducted after a tornado, revealed critical system failures that would have been missed by traditional approaches. By prioritizing psychological safety and empathy, an organization can learn more, respond better, and strengthen its safety systems. Key takeaway: In times of crisis, shift your focus from blaming individuals to learning from the event to improve the system. Train your teams in HOP principles before an event occurs. 2. Activate Your Business Continuity Plan—Early Statistics show that 40% of businesses without a continuity plan never reopen after a disaster. A well-designed Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is your roadmap to recovery, and it must be more than a static document. Using the tornado example scenario mentioned earlier, here are some steps leaders should take immediately following an event: gather updates from the scene, assess employee safety and infrastructure, coordinate emergency communications, and identify critical functions that must be restored first (e.g., payroll, IT, procurement). Common pitfalls include failing to escalate quickly, not testing plans, or struggling with outdated contact lists and contractual agreements. Proactive planning, prepared with regular walkthroughs, desktop simulations, and role-play exercises, helps mitigate these gaps. Key takeaway: Act quickly and don't wait to activate your BCP. Regularly test it through integrated emergency drills and full recovery simulations. The more you train, whether through desktop or role-play, the more confident and capable your response will be. 3. Turn Recovery into Continuous Improvement Recovery is not the final step; it's the beginning of building back better. Every incident, no matter how severe, is a learning opportunity. Post-disaster debriefs should include more than logistics. They must evaluate what worked, what didn't, and what needs to change. This includes reassessing your maximum tolerable outages, reviewing contractor performance, validating contact info, and refining communications strategies. One of the most overlooked reasons recovery plans fail? They're never tested under pressure. Exercises like scenario-based simulations and post-exercise reviews give your teams the chance to build muscle memory—so they know how to respond when it really counts. Key takeaway: Don't file away your recovery plan once the crisis passes. Update it based on rea l-world lessons and stress-test it regularly to build resilience over time. 4. Make Compassionate Recovery Part of Your Safety Culture After a disaster, one of the most powerful things a leader can do is acknowledge the emotional toll on employees. A serious injury, or the loss of a colleague, can leave teams grieving, disoriented, and fearful. A trauma-informed recovery approach prioritizes people. It includes access to grief counseling or Employee Assistance Programs (EAP), compassionate communication from leadership, flexible time-off policies, and thoughtful reintegration of staff into operations. It also means pausing—not pushing—when employees need space to process. A leadership team's empathetic response to a tragic employee fatality, such as bringing in counselors, delaying the restart of operations, and holding a remembrance event, can have a profound and lasting impact on workforce trust and morale. These actions show employees that their well-being is a priority, helping to strengthen safety culture and build long-term resilience. Key takeaway: How you respond in the aftermath of a crisis will define your safety culture. A human-centered approach builds not just recovery but long-term loyalty and resilience. Frequently Asked Questions Q: How can we build HOP principles into recovery exercises? A: Integrate emotional scenarios into your desktop or live simulations, such as an injury or structural damage, so teams can practice asking better, more empathetic questions and avoid falling back into blame-based patterns. Q: What makes a good debrief after a crisis? A: Look beyond whether the 'plan' was followed. Review if vendors met expectations, if communication tools worked, and if decisions were made quickly enough. In today's hybrid work environment, evaluating your communication plan is critical—were messages timely, accurate, and received by the right people to enable decision-making? Also focus on key metrics like restoration time, data loss, and leadership response to truly gauge effectiveness. Q: How can I ensure our business continuity plan will actually work? A: Test it. Start with a simple walkthrough, then evolve into full scenario simulations. Review contracts, contact details, and access to backup locations or systems. Ensure your leaders know how and when to activate the plan. Looking Ahead True disaster recovery goes beyond patching holes. It's about rebuilding with purpose and listening to your employees, testing your systems, and learning with humility. By integrating HOP principles, activating and updating your continuity plans, and leading with compassion, your organization can emerge from crisis not just operational, but stronger, safer, and more united than ever. Need help building a resilient recovery plan or training your leaders in HOP? Reach out today! We're here to support your people and your process. Visit 3BL Media to see more multimedia and stories from Antea Group
Associated Press
08-07-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
Key Takeaways From the EHSxRetail Peer Industry Roundtable Event
Recently, we had the pleasure of hosting our annual EHSxRetail event that brought together clients to discuss critical topics in environmental, health, and safety (EHS) within the retail industry. The EHSxRetail peer industry roundtable event is a unique opportunity for education, learning, benchmarking, and networking. Here are some key topics and takeaways from this year's event. Stress Testing EHS Programs In the current geopolitical climate, many retailers are finding it challenging to balance lean operational budgets with proactive program improvement. Traditional tools like incident reporting metrics and audits can be lagging indicators and difficult to implement across numerous stores. Some retailers have turned to surveys to anticipate potential issues, which has the added benefit of engaging employees and making them feel heard. Others have found ways to integrate EHS directly into business operations. Occupational Health and Psychosocial Safety One of the major topics discussed was occupational health and psychosocial safety. With new regulatory requirements driving a stronger emphasis on mental health, the conversation highlighted the challenges of defining terms like 'high workload' and the division of responsibilities between EHS and HR. Some retailers have implemented mental health and wellness programs, including mental health first aid, discounted gym memberships, and incentives for healthy activities, with varying degrees of success. Exploring multiple options to find the best fit for your organization is crucial. Workplace Violence Implementation Challenges Workplace violence is a significant concern in retail, where interactions with aggressive customers are becoming routine, and crisis events are becoming more common. The discussion around this sensitive topic highlighted the implementation challenges of workplace violence programs. Effective training is crucial for ensuring employee safety. However, desktop training is not always enough to override our natural fight-or-flight response and conducting practice drills can be too intense. While only California and New York currently require workplace violence programs, other states are actively working on addressing this issue. Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) The event also shed light on the success stories of Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) initiatives. HOP is a risk-based operating philosophy that recognizes human error as part of the human condition and emphasizes system-level solutions. Some attendees have seen significant success at their companies by implementing components of HOP into their company's existing safety program. One of the key elements is to ask more questions and dig deeper into the root cause, with resources like the culpability matrix available to support this philosophy. Conclusion Attending the EHSxRetail peer industry roundtable event was an enriching experience. The event highlighted the importance of addressing both physical and mental health in the workplace, the challenges of implementing effective workplace violence programs, and the benefits of adopting HOP principles. As we continue to navigate the complex world of EHS in retail, we appreciate the unique perspectives shared by all the EHSxRetail participants and look forward to continuing the conversation. Learn more about EHSxRetail and stay tuned for future events here! Visit 3BL Media to see more multimedia and stories from Antea Group
