What happens when you find yourself in the middle of a crisis, some of your facilities are impacted, and suddenly you need to relocate several critical teams to an alternate workplace for an indeterminate period of time.
If you have planned well, then you’re ready to execute your plan.
But if you haven’t….
In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser along with Senior Consultant Jennifer Otremba discuss alternate workplace strategies for business continuity situations. Topics discussed by the experts from Bryghtpath include the business impact analysis (BIA), effective business continuity planning, trends in alternate workplace strategies, and their own practical experience with managing large-scale business continuity situations that required the use of alternate workplace strategies.
| Bryan Strawser: | A bad thing has happened. The boom has happened.
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| Jen Otremba: | What do we do now?
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| Bryan Strawser: | We’re on the right side of the boom.
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| Jen Otremba: | Yeah.
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| Bryan Strawser: | We’re responding. We’ve activated our crisis process. We’ve realized that we’ve got a facility or two that has impact.
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| Jen Otremba: | For whatever reason.
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| Bryan Strawser: | For whatever reason and now we’re activating business continuity plans for critical teams that are in those facilities and we run into the problem of alternate workspace.
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| Jen Otremba: | Yeah. We may have planned for this or we may not have planned for this.
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| Bryan Strawser: | We hope that we have a plan for this.
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| Jen Otremba: | I always like it when you discussed your story about what had happened with the flooding where individuals lost their workspace because of flooding. Because oftentimes, we think about this like the tornado blew the building the over, but it’s not always like that.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Yeah. We always seem to think of the catastrophic situation, but I think we relayed it previously on the podcast many years ago. An employer of mine at the time, 50 story skyscraper building in Minneapolis where we occupied 40-ish floors of the building, there was a flood inside the building. The flood was caused by a one inch water line that ran into an ice maker that had a filter change on a Friday or a Thursday and by Saturday night it was leaking and by Sunday afternoon had proceeded to flood. I believe it was three and a half floors of the building. Now, we had 600-ish, 800-ish employees that we need to work and couldn’t work because there was three to four inches of standing water in their offices and cubicles and common workspace.
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| Jen Otremba: | They couldn’t work in that space.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Couldn’t work in that space. That’s correct. Important distinction. This is where this whole idea of alternate workspace comes up is if they can’t work there then where can the work?
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| Jen Otremba: | Right.
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| Bryan Strawser: | How do we solve that problem?
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| Jen Otremba: | Yeah.
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| Bryan Strawser: | We build a second building that just sits empty and when you have disruption, you just move people to your other $250 million skyscraper. That’s how this works.
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| Jen Otremba: | I think we’ve seen this come up in even less drastic situations like that and it’s become more and more common to work elsewhere when there is a snowstorm and I can’t get work or the transportation that the company has provided for me to get to work is not running because there’s a massive snowstorm, things like that. I have to come up with an alternate plan as to where I can work.
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| Bryan Strawser: | I made a joke earlier about the secondary $250 million skyscraper, so that was just to be clear, that was a joke since we just moved on quickly from there.
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| Jen Otremba: | We did. Yes.
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| Bryan Strawser: | This really starts with when we’re talking about alternate workspace, what we’re really talking about here is if your primary workplace is not usable, where can you go and work? We very rapidly come to another fork in the discussion, which is well, is there anything special about your workspace that really has to be there for you to be able to do your job? I don’t mean do your job in comfort and luxury that you might’ve had in your previous, your normal workspace probably. What do you really need to do your job? I was always in jobs that I could really work from anywhere. What I needed was I need a phone, I need a computer, I need internet connectivity, I need my computer’s basic set of apps, Microsoft Office and access to web and Slack and instant messenger and whatever.
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| I didn’t really need anything special to be able to do my job.
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| Jen Otremba: | Right. There certainly are positions that require specific tools, specific locations, specific things in order to do your job there.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Right. If you work in a contact center …
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| Jen Otremba: | For instance.
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| Bryan Strawser: | … For any of the contact center disciplines, collection, customer service, outbound sales calls, etc., well there’s some pretty specialized stuff going on there. You’ve got a computer with certain software. You probably have a soft phone or a VoIP phone that connects to the computer and gets information from it. You probably have a dialing system and the calls are recorded. Some of this, some of this you could probably live without. Some of this required by regulation in your [inaudible 00:04:29]. You’re going to have to have it in order to continue that operation, but in almost every case, you’re not going to be able to do this from home. Although, we are finally starting to see some cloud solutions come out for this sort of thing.
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| Jen Otremba: | Yeah. We’re of course not talking about things like doctors and nurses in a hospital setting that clearly need to be there in order to do their job.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Right.
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| Jen Otremba: | We’re talking about other positions that can be done elsewhere. Right?
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| Bryan Strawser: | As we start to dig into this, there’s certainly as you start to devise an alternate workspace strategy, this really starts off with data. In what’s likely your business continuity life cycle, your planning process, you’re asking questions about facilities, applications, technology requirements, specific workspace needs, like dolly software exam tables for a doctor.
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| Jen Otremba: | Sure. Even those in some cases can be moved elsewhere for a temporary period of time.
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| Bryan Strawser: | That’s right. There’s a lot you could do with a wireless laptop and a stethoscope and some basic medical equipment.
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| Jen Otremba: | Sure.
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| Bryan Strawser: | You probably don’t want to be doing that out in the middle of a parking lot.
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| Jen Otremba: | Right. You came up with a plan for that, but yes, you’re right. You start with the data.
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| Bryan Strawser: | You’re capturing a lot of this data.
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| Jen Otremba: | Right. I think this is an interesting point about the story that you told in introducing this is that that BIA data should point towards specific individuals that need a specific workspace. In that case, that was not the case. Many of those individuals were not on the BIA as critical employees in a certain location, that kind of thing, but there were still displaced.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Right. In the example we were talking about, the flooding in the skyscraper, very few of those 800 individuals and the four or five teams they were a part of were really critical, were performing critical roles because through our process in the business impact analysis and understanding criticality, they didn’t meet our criteria so they therefore did not have allocated alternate workspace, which was a defined strategy that we had. In fact, they didn’t plan at all because they were not considered to be critical processes until the Monday following the … Until Monday when we had a discussion with our leaders and we were quickly corrected of I don’t really care what the BIA says, maybe we filled it out wrong or whatever, but now they’re critical so they need a space to work.
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| Jen Otremba: | Yeah.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Okay. Fine.
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| Jen Otremba: | Being prepared for that as well [inaudible 00:06:53].
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| Bryan Strawser: | Right.
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| Jen Otremba: | Or being prepared to have that discussion with your leadership.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Right.
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| Jen Otremba: | On the spot.
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| Bryan Strawser: | As you’re thinking about devising alternate workspace strategies, I think we talked about dealing with the data. I think really analyzing this data and being a little challenging about why people need alternate workspace because most companies in today’s day and age don’t keep a spare building around and probably don’t have a whole lot of space to be able to consolidate folks. First, I think you want to start with let’s get this list down to what actually needs alternate workspace, who has to a physical place to work. If they can work remotely then have them work remotely, until you get through that first two, three, four, weeks of response and you and your facilities partners come up with the what’s the long term answer going to be for how we deal with the loss of this, loss or damage to this facility.
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| Jen Otremba: | Or if those positions aren’t immediately critical, they can be put on hold for a period of time, too.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Right.
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| Jen Otremba: | Really coming up with clear data on exactly what that looks like for how many people and what the workspaces may look like and having all of that information to be able to discuss with the people writing the checks. Right? Who’s paying the bills here?
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| Bryan Strawser: | Not going to be me.
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| Jen Otremba: | Not going to be me. That’s going to be a tough discussion though, I think.
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| Bryan Strawser: | It is. I think this is actually a really difficult … This is a really difficult thing to work through because if you’ve not done this before and your company is of any size whatsoever, this can be a pretty expensive proposition. I know as we’ve worked with clients, we’ve done a number of things around alternate workspace. We’ve seen conference rooms wired with additional ethernet jacks and a space for people to work. We’ve seen common areas furniture removed, tables and chairs and stuff so that folks can work. We’ve seen cafeterias where it’s pre-wired with network and phone power so that you bring it down from the ceiling or you pull up tiles in the floor and there’s the connectivity you need to relocate contact centers and critical pieces like that.
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| There’s a lot of ways that you can approach this. We have a client that is literally building a compound where they’re able to bring in vendor provided trailers for a temporary workspace and they’re wiring it with fiber and power and a bathroom setup and everything that they feel like is necessary in order to provide even in the alternate situation the workspace environment that they seek to have for employees.
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| Jen Otremba: | They have the real estate to do that.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Correct.
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| Jen Otremba: | [inaudible 00:09:36].
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| Bryan Strawser: | Even this is still a … This is a significant project for them to undertake.
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| Jen Otremba: | Yeah.
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| Bryan Strawser: | In all of these efforts, we’ve seen success where companies have taken the time to really do us a thorough analysis of let’s get down to who really has to have space, let’s make a good analysis of what we’re going to need to fulfill those issues if these are disrupted and then what are the different options that we can go through in order to get to the best possible answer and then bring those options to your executives or your governance structure or what have you in order to talk through those.
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| Jen Otremba: | Yeah. I think that’s really the best way to be prepared for those discussions with your senior leaders is to having all of the data and also having the financial information upfront, so it’s going to be very costly.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Right.
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| Jen Otremba: | But, having all of that information and being able to provide the financial considerations around that and also what the financial considerations could potentially look like without that if something were to happen.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Right. It’s important to look at other options too, like hotels, hotel conference rooms. If you have people that can work using a laptop and VPN and all they need is wifi, you can do a lot in a 600 person banquet room. I’m not going to pretend it’s going to be cozy and that you’re all going to be singing kumbaya together, but you got a place to go, there’s bathrooms that’s dry or it’s warm or chilled depending upon what climate you’re in.
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| Jen Otremba: | Right.
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| Bryan Strawser: | That might be a better option than having people outside in trailers for two weeks.
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| Jen Otremba: | Yeah. Absolutely. Additionally in this, we can’t really have this discussion without going back to the remote work discussion or the working from home discussion or however you want to look at that. Because in some cultures, it’s absolutely normal. For instance, at Bryghtpath here, we work elsewhere all the time.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Can’t remember the last time I saw Jen in person.
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| Jen Otremba: | I’m here now. Even you, Bryan, we work from all over the place, really.
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| Bryan Strawser: | We do. We work from all around the world.
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| Jen Otremba: | We travel a lot. We work from all over the world and we don’t need any special equipment to do that, but we do need our laptop, our internet, our VPN, our access to our applications, and things like that. It’s normal in our culture to operate this way.
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| Bryan Strawser: | But, we work with companies who remote work is foreign to them.
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| Jen Otremba: | Right. Introducing or potentially introducing that as a normal way to operate.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Definitely an area of challenge.
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| Jen Otremba: | It can be an area of challenge, yes.
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| Bryan Strawser: | It’s definitely worth talking through. If remote work is not part of your organization’s culture and you’re going to use remote work as an alternate workspace strategy or most of the time you’re going to go to remote work before you go to alternate workspace because it is cheaper, it’s faster to execute, and in many ways, it works just as well. If that’s not part or your culture, that’s going to be a real adjustment for folks. If the only way that your team for example knows how to collaborate is to do it in person across the table or by talking across cubicles or offices or whatever and all of a sudden they’re all working from their own homes, that collaboration is not going to come easy to them. You’re going to have to really work at it to make that work.
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| Jen Otremba: | That said, it would be as part of your strategy, that’s something you want to start testing and working on. Whether that be testing your VPN limits or working occasionally on a remote basis to practice that collaborative work from elsewhere.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Right. We do think that remote work is something that’s overlooked a lot in alternate workspace strategies. Certainly, something that you want to look at and dig into as you’re devising own strategy and certainly not be afraid to challenge the current status quo because we think it’s better to take on the remote work challenge and challenge the culture if your company really doesn’t support such a thing than to go invest hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in an alternate workspace strategy that could really be replaced by letting 70, 80 people work from home during a disruption.
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| Jen Otremba: | Yeah. I think another important part to think about through that if you’re going to use remote work is understanding that, like you said earlier, it’s cheaper and faster. If your employees can’t get to an office for whatever reason being a natural disaster or something like that, but they’re already at home, it’s safer for them to stay at home and continue working.
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| Bryan Strawser: | That’s right.
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| Jen Otremba: | There’s really some advantages of allowing that remote work culture.
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| Bryan Strawser: | To recap then on the alternate workspace discussion for today, understand the situation, understand the data, particularly from your BIA or business continuity lifecycle. Give it a thorough analysis. Be challenging on departments and teams and their thoughts on alternate workspace and get them down to what they truly need to have in the event of a major disruption. Pull together some options to discuss with your governance committee or your senior executives to work through the problem and then put a solid plan in place and think about the different options, including remote work, as a successful way to manage these kind of situations as opposed to setting up alternate facilities.
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