You take many steps when starting, growing, and maintaining your business. These steps include hiring the right people, advertising, and developing a solid customer service reputation. Many companies don’t consider business availability and what happens when the power goes out. Every business assumes that power will always be available, but unexpected situations occur when the power is out for an extended period. Here are five ways for your business to prepare for a power failure.
Your Business Should Have an Emergency Plan in Place for Power Outages
A power outage will impact many areas, including the safety of your people and company data. Your business should treat a power outage as an emergency. Your company data can be synced to the cloud or other offsite locations to protect the data when systems shut down, and the data remains accessible. As for your computer systems and other equipment, a battery back up solution will protect your technology investment and allow equipment to continue running during the power outage.
Your Business Should Consider Installing a Generator
A generator should be your solution if your business needs to continue running for an extended period without standard power. There is advanced planning and testing to ensure the generator works when required. A generator is expensive but will typically pay for itself when considered with a return on investment to potential business losses. Many businesses invest money in generators in other areas, so you need to decide the importance of a generator.
Your Business Should Have Emergency Equipment in Place
When the power goes out within a business, the outage usually occurs at inopportune times, and each person in the company feels the impact. Flashlights will be critical tools in these situations, but you must also consider food, medical supplies, water, and other supplies. These items come in handy with a prolonged outage due to dramatic circumstances such as a tornado, earthquake, or other factors that impact the power and the building.
Your Business Should Plan on the Fact That Your Employees May Not Be Available to Help
The people in your business are your greatest asset. How you support your teams and help each person with work-life balance drives employee satisfaction. When a power failure occurs, you need to understand the outage may be limited to a small area of town or impacts an entire city. When a complete city-wide power outage occurs, the homes of each company employee may be affected. In this situation, many of your employees may have to leave for different reasons, and as a result, your business may be working with a reduced staff size.
Your Business Should Simulate Power Failures
The first time your business tests the emergency plan can’t be during an emergency. During the year, schedule test situations during ordinarily slow periods in business operations. Employees should know where to go during a power outage and what steps to take to communicate with their supervisor. Many companies do one test and then forget that new employees have started afterward and have no emergency training. Most power outages are quick, but you want to prepare for all levels by training each person.
You have put many hours into building your business, so you must protect your time and financial investment. Power outages are unpredictable and disruptive. More times than not, the power outage will happen during the busiest time. The decision you need to make for your business is if you want to work with emergency power planning you have in place or spend hours on the phone with the power company hoping they will fix your outage.
