Policies and Procedures
Ensuring your company policies and procedures are up to date and meet Provincial requirements is essential to maintaining a compliant workplace, will reduce accidents and injury and will allow you to respond to unexpected events, mitigating the impacts on your day to day operations.
Employee Handbooks
A comprehensive, current, and relevant employee handbook is essential for any employer. Not only does it articulate the organizations vision and values, an employee handbook provides employees with the procedures they are required to follow in matters such as, harassment, diversity, recruitment and promotion guidelines, and whistle-blower provisions to name a few. The employee handbook also serves as a resource where employees can refer if they have questions about certain areas of the organization’s operations.
Additionally, if a business is ever subject to an employee complaint or regulatory investigation, the employee handbook will be used to establish if you have followed your own policies and procedures as they relate to the matter under review.
In many cases businesses spend significant time and money developing an employee handbook but fail to keep it current and relevant.
Mission Workplace Consulting will develop your employee handbook and can provide an annual review and update.
Emergency Response Procedures
Mission Workplace Consulting has experience developing and implementing emergency response policies and procedures in both public sectors, private sector, and non-profit sectors. In many cases organizations in high risk sectors have comprehensive emergency response procedures, yet in many smaller lower risk organizations, these procedures sometimes get overlooked. All organizations should have a clear, comprehensive emergency response plan to direct a response to an unforeseen occurrence. This could be something as simple as how employees should manage interactions with clients or other employees, how to respond to a fire, flood or safety incident or managing communications during a sensitive incident.
When an organization faces an emergency, the most important component of a successful response is to respond quickly, understand your role in the process, know who is in charge and follow the instructions provided. It is for this reason a clear and comprehensive emergency response protocol is essential to the successful management of an incident. Many large organizations utilize an incident command system such as ICS. While this is not necessary or possible for smaller businesses, following a set plan make any response more efficient.
Business Continuity Plan
What happens when your business faces an event that disrupts the ability for a business to conduct regular operations?
If your organization is impacted by a flood, fire, weather event, power or systems outage, or public health emergency the priority is to protect your organization, minimize disruption, continue operations, service clients and limit financial impact.
If you had asked business owners in 2019 whether they thought their operations would be shut down due to a pandemic for three months in 2020, most if not all would have said, No! Yet COVID-19 did exactly that for many.
While a business continuity plan would not have saved all the businesses impacted a global pandemic, for many planning for such an event could have provided some resilience to such an event.
In this age of technology and automation it is possible for organizations to move operations from their “bricks and mortar” set up to a virtual or remote environment.
The COVID-19 pandemic has advanced innovation is many ways. Whether it is schools delivering online classes, the use of video conferencing to provide much needed counselling to doctor’s appointments or restaurants and retailers operating curbside pick-up, one thing is true for all these operations, they require planning and practice.
A robust business continuity plan that is implemented, tested, and evaluated would not stop your business being impacted by an unexpected event. However, it provides you with a playbook to minimize disruption in a shorter timeline.