In today’s competitive society it is simply not good enough to blame London transport for a degradation to your regular customer service and support. Business continuity is expected.

If key staff cannot get to their desks, their incoming calls may remain unanswered, leaving potential customers an opportunity to go to your competitors instead. This type of scenario could easily be avoided by enabling those employees to work flexibly from home or other local location without having to fight their way through traffic to get to their regular office.

Aim for 100% continuity
When considering implementing a telecoms business continuity solution you should aim to ensure that the service you provide to your customers and suppliers is as close to normality as possible. By achieving this you minimise any negative effects of the disruption. Yet many businesses are settling for second best rather than 100% continuity.

Better than most but still not 100%
Gareth Howell (blogger on Business Continuity UK) had such a situation when BT disconnected lines into his office in order to fix a fault. With 5 minutes warning Gareth was able to get onto his company website on his laptop via his 3G modem and had his calls re-directed to a service in Luton. The people in Luton then informed him that someone had called and he was then able to return their call.

I applaud Gareth for having the foresight to have both systems and processes in place to cope with disruption to communications. However I do wonder why, when the technology is available, Gareth chose to have his calls re-directed to other people than have his number re-routed to his mobile phone or other landline phone which he could use.

In the same way that Gareth’s incoming calls have been re-directed to Luton via his local BT exchange, they could just as easily be re-routed to his mobile phone.

How do you re-direct your incoming calls during a disruption? The same way as Gareth or something different?

Michael Rendell, HR services leader at PwC, said financial firms that are able to accommodate flexible working will enjoy better levels of staff morale.

It is also widely accepted that those organisations may also be in a better position to retain the most talented employees.

Modern lives are so full with work, commuting, pressure and home/ family responsibilities that people often feel that their lives are being dictated for them and that they have little control over their time. Being able to work flexibly gives people back that control which in turn leads to more productive and balanced lives.

For the financial sector, working from home or other location has sometimes been seen as too risky, where private information may get leaked. But I would argue that this risk can easily be mitigated with processes and technology.

Security measures to protect laptops should be in force whether the employee is based at home or in the office, and voice recording of calls, whether by mobile or landline, can be the norm wherever an employee is located.

The number of job roles which can be performed away from the traditional office building is ever increasing, and this should be the case for the financial sector as well.

When an organisation has a mix of employees based in the office and some working from home either permanently or part of the week, the reliance upon email, landlines and mobile phones is of particular importance in being able to keep those remote employees informed of company news and everyday news from managers or team members.

In an emergency situation such as a real or even suspected terrorist threat in the area where an office building is located, senior management would want to be sure that their employees were fully aware of how they were managing the situation and that they had their employees’ welfare at heart. The natural communication methods of choice would be to send a message via email, SMS, and perhaps post updates on an intranet site in larger organisations.

But bear in mind that during the July 7th bombings the mobile network was so overloaded that many people could not get their messages through. Smart organisations will be looking for a multi-channel solution which can intelligently send messages on a priority basis, firstly trying SMS and then, if no response is made, trying email, voice recording on a landline or web status page. In today’s social media society publishing messages via Twitter and Facebook is also a perfectly legitimate way of reaching people.

In non-emergency situations the same tool coud be used to target customers with tailored information that would be of value to them, for example if a person signed up to a cinema’s mailing list they could receive timely SMS texts relating to film offers. Businesses could also send out promotions to their dealers, resellers or suppliers simultaneously.

The applications of a rapid notification solution are only limited by a person’s imagination, and in our ‘networking’ society it is more important than ever that the right information gets to the right people at the right time.

Technology great, process not great
Gareth Howell’s blog on ‘why business continuity planning should deal with processes, not technology’ quotes a fantastic example of lack of process undermining technology.

He cites a medium-sized company which had purchased laptops and remote access for employees to use in times when the office becomes inaccessible. However in January this year when the severe snow arrived it became obvious that keeping the laptops in the office was not the wisest of ideas as the employees were unable to get there to pick them up!

Process great, technology not great
However on the flip side the process could be in place – employees keeping the laptops at home for just an occasion – but then how will those employees continue answering their incoming calls that are directed at their office desk?

Unless the technology is available to re-route those individual incoming calls seamlessly to the employees’ home phone, then the phone will be ringing endlessly at the empty office.

A throrough planning of technology and processes which work together is the only way to ensure that should the worst happen to stop your staff from getting to work, everything is covered.

A recent article in the Money section of the Guardian on the topic of the rise in homeworking cites several examples of how home working is actually improving business and productivity. Caroline Waters, BT’s director of people and policy backs up BT’s claim that it gets an average of 20% more work from its home-working employees stating:

“It works amazingly for us. You get great productivity, reduced sick absence, high levels of performance. And we know it works for a lot of other organisations, because we help a lot of them put it in place.”

As an ex-BT home-worker myself and can fully testify to this statement. I tended to work longer hours as I had no commute to negotiate and I took fewer sick days as I was able to work when I felt up to it and rest when I needed to. With two young children in nursery and school it was the ideal arrangement. My manager got the best of me as did my family.

So for employers who do not want to promote home working I think you’re missing a trick, and actually what you are saying to your company is that you don’t trust your employees, which begs the question: why did you hire them in the first place?

If all were to be off at the same time and a major disruption happened to your organisation’s building, who would be in charge of the business continuity plans and would they know how to keep the business operational?

Let’s take an example of a possible scenario. The BC Manager and Telecoms manager are both off on holiday and summer flash flooding has left your offices under 3ft of water.

1. Whose responsibility is it to tell employees not to come into the office, to either work from home or go to the recovery site?
2. How are you going to ensure that your IT and telecoms systems are operating as stated in your business continuity plans?
3. Have people been informed that the BC and IT managers are off on holiday?
4. Who will be communicating to the media, suppliers and customers that you are still open for business but are operating under your business continuity plans?
5. Does every employee know what they should be doing in this scenario, and who is in charge of keeping the business functional?
6. Are your employees able to continue taking calls from customers, suppliers and collegaues during and after they have been denied access to their office building and regular desk?

If any of these questions make you nervous then I would suggest that you start addressing this issues at a micro level so that if the worst happens you know who will be pressing the button that will re-route your incoming calls to alternative phones in alternative locations.

Always have a back-up to implement your back-up plan!

Many terms, but only one meaning?
I read an article in the London Chambers magazine today by Lyndon Bird, Technical Director of the BCI, who was unravelling the meanings of business continuity, resilience, emergency planning and crisis management, and it struck me that there certainly is a variety of understanding of these different aspects of our particular discipline. His argument is that while some see Business Continuity Management as ‘an operational response to large scale incidents, usually involving significant asset loss. In actual fact BCM is about finding strategic solutions to the loss of one or more of seven key resources (customers, suppliers, staff, facilities, technology, cash-flow and goodwill).’

A different perspective
I personally would have worded this last sentence rather differently. I don’t believe that BCM is about finding strategic solutions to the loss of resources, I would say it is about implementing strategic solutions, testing them, communicating to employees about them and making them part of everyday working practices. The idea that telecoms resilience is about having a plan that can be activated in an emergency is, in my opinion, a fragile one. Telecoms resilience should be used hand in hand with flexible working practices as part of normal, everyday working culture. If you, as an employee, don’t know how you will answer your incoming calls should your office be out of bounds then by definition your telecoms resilience plan has already failed.

Everyday not just for disruptions
Business continuity, and in particular the technology aspect of its planning, is not for a few people to decide what will happen during a disruption, but should filter into every employee’s everyday psyche. Most people know what to do when their office fire alarm goes off, but how many know how to access the information they need to carry on working? Of those who know that they will be shipped off to a recovery site, how many know how or even if their phone calls will be re-routed to their new temporary desk?

Flexible Working is a real encouragement
29% of Brits surveyed said that the provision of flexible working would encourage them not to take so many sick days. With the added cost saving benefits that flexible working provides, it’s a wonder that more organisations are not providing it as standard. Many of the larger organisations in the UK already have good provision for flexible hours and flexible location for working but it’s the medium and smaller companies that seem to be stuck in the ‘presence = control’ rut.

Government warms to flexible working
Yet finally it seems that councils are beginning to think about flexible working. One lady I spoke with at a recent civil contingencies conference made reference to the fact that the majority of welsh local authority call centres will be looking to adopt a more flexible working approach which will reduce the number of expensive properties which need maintaining for office based staff.

So if all the evidence is leading organisations to the same conclusion – namely flexible working equals cost savings, are you taking advantage of it?

Enabling employees to work from home is the surefire way of easing transport congestion and commuting nightmares and the government is discussing flexible working incentives to achieve this (though it is not clear exactly what these will be).

But if plans are realistically going to work, the government also needs to help advise employers in practical, technical solutions which enable their employees to access not only their regular IT systems but also to answer their incoming calls on their regular phone number. By doing this there will be no need to change published phone numbers or any need to give out mobile numbers. Calls can be re-routed at the local telecoms exchange to home phones, mobile phones, or indeed any phone anywhere.

Moving from a permanent office based culture to one of flexibile working is not always an easy transition, more often than not because managers fear losing control. The key to its success is to make it as seamless as possible for employees, colleagues, customers and the general public so that customer service is not impeded in any way. Systems and processes need to be adapted, not changed to make this transition easier.

The government is planning to offer incentives to employers to encourage increased flexible working practices which will contribute to the government’s drive to slash transport congestion. The aim is to urge employers to let their staff work from home, where possible, one day every fortnight. The introduction of more flexible working hours will also be encouraged to reduce the strain on transport ‘rush hours’.

Train companies are also being approached to revise how season tickets are sold so that employees are not having to pay for train fares when they are not in the office. One suggestion is to change to a European style ‘carnet’ system where a book of tickets are issued and used as and when required.

At last the government is buying in to the cost savings and transport benefits of flexible working. Let’s hope they follow through and we can all get back to working productively without the commuting stress.