Steps to Prepare for an Emergency

A good emergency preparedness plan is the key to minimizing the chance of injury or damage if anything happens at your place of business. Here are a few crucial emergency preparation tips for Albuquerque, NM business owners.

Assess all possible risks

In order to properly prepare for emergency situations, you must first admit that risks exist and understand how they might affect you. Depending on where you live in the United States, you may face natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes and snowstorms, or devastating events like wildfires. Your business’ physical location could pose other risks—think flood plains, or being near power plants or hazardous waste facilities. Lastly, consider any dangerous chemicals or equipment you keep or work with on site. Once you know what risks your local area faces, you can start assessing the most likely possibilities and finish with the least likely.

Write out a plan

After you list the types of emergencies that could occur, grab your notepad or computer and write down instructions for handling them. The majority of business owners that have created emergency preparedness plans recommend you make a plan for each of the assessed possible threats and put them in separate folders or sections of a giant binder. This simple method allows each person on staff to quickly grab a particular plan and follow it without losing time looking around aimlessly.

Writing plans is the most challenging step of any preparedness plan, so don’t hesitate to reach out to an experienced security company or experts in the emergency preparedness industry for help.

Train your staff

There’s more to preparing for emergencies than simply writing out plans. You must also ensure that everyone on the team will be able to act on your plans should something happen. The best way to get everyone in the office prepared is to schedule regular trainings and drills. When practicing emergency plans, assign everyone a role—for example, individuals to take the lead, confirm head counts, communicate orders to employees and secure certain office property.

It can also be useful to have staff trained on CPR and other first aid procedures. The skills learned during CPR training could be the difference between life and death one day.

Ultimately, training enhances your employees’ emergency procedure skills and their confidence to handle any emergency common to your business, and conducting drills will ingrain in everyone the importance of following written emergency procedures without hesitation.

Update emergency procedures

All preparedness documents are subject to updating. Once a year, gather your emergency preparedness committee and all plans. Schedule a time to meet with all employees, security guards, security systems experts and even local law enforcement to reassess your written plans. Take look at the plans from top to bottom, but also note any changes in the size of your staff, security, communications systems or evacuation routes. If you’ve moved to a new building recently, that’s reason enough for a major preparedness plan update.

Keep this list of emergency preparation tips for Albuquerque, NM businesses on hand, but don’t hesitate to contact Advance On-Site Protection Security for more info. Our security guard services will keep your business safe around the clock!

Categorised in: Safety Tips

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