What can businesses do to prepare for hurricane season, reduce avoidable costs, protect their people and assets and maintain operational resilience?
If your business operates in active hurricane areas, you should already be aware of the financial, safety and operational risks posed by natural disasters. Being prepared ahead of time is vital for mitigating these risks.
It is hurricane season once again, and in recent years, the magnitude of these storms has been increasing. According to Weather Underground, four out of the top five most active hurricane seasons have all been within the last 20 years:
Many sources predict that 2024 will be another highly active Atlantic hurricane season, with up to 23 named storms, 11 of which are expected to become hurricanes and five major hurricanes.
With this in mind, as hurricane season approaches, how can business leaders better understand hurricane risks – and prepare for their impact?
Training and resilience:
Keeping a cool head in a crisis helps you do the right thing when catastrophe hits. Effective preparation and training is key to achieving this, helping your team understand the best practices in hurricane scenarios and feel confident in their response in a high stress situation.
Our resilience resource portal provides in-depth training documentation. This cost-effective solution is aligned with a range of NFPA, ISO, and BSI standards and allows business professionals to access a variety of resources in multiple languages.
When preparing for hurricane season our clients often use this portal as a refresher for their employees to ensure information is front of mind. For example, our “Organizational Safety, Security and Emergency Management Guide”, “Emergency Action Guide” and “Risk Assessment Template” can be a useful starting point for many organizations.
In addition, we offer a range of e-learning courses, video game solutions and leadership tabletop simulations that can provide additional knowledge for your team, whether they are operational staff or part of the leadership team. Courses such as “Senior Risk and Business Continuity Leader’s Program” or “Individual Awareness and Competency Development for Natural Disasters” can plug any knowledge gaps and increase individual and team preparedness.
If you require a more thorough approach to training, we also offer consultancy support whereby one of our experts can come into your organization and work with your staff to equip them with the knowledge they need. As Certified Lead Auditors for ISO 22031, we can also work with you to ensure once a training program is deployed, it is maintained. We conduct annual audits and recommendations to ensure it remains fit for purpose. In addition, our Train the Trainer programs mean we can upskill one of your employees to be the lead safety and resilience contact who carries out these duties internally.
Our aim is to support you in fostering a culture based on safety and resilience, leading to business continuity.
Property and construction evaluations:
How will your facilities hold up under hurricane conditions? The worst time to learn the answer to this is when a hurricane strikes. Regular, thorough evaluations of your assets are an essential preventative measure to mitigate any impact of a natural disaster on your operations, ensuring that your facilities are set up in the best possible way and that you are properly prepared for a catastrophic event.
In addition to training solutions, we also have a team of over 200 engineers in 35 countries who drive improvement outcomes and mitigate property risk. This preventative maintenance approach can reduce costs and risk for businesses ahead of hurricane season, allowing them to effectively protect their assets from strong winds and flooding.
Our team has extensive reach and local expertise, we can act as an extension of your team visiting your premises as a precaution to mitigate issues ahead of time, and we can also support you during and after a crisis to minimize disruption.
Our team of qualified risk engineers can offer support and advice through property risk evaluation and mitigation services, business continuity assessments, and specialized inspections. We can also help you develop knowledge and skills within your team to better manage and react to crises such as hurricanes.
Whether you are in the construction phase or already have existing properties, we can assess natural catastrophe risks, develop business continuity and disaster recovery resilience strategies, conduct specialized inspections, and analyze potential business interruption values, offering targeted support for both prevention and recovery.
Effective preparedness can be useful for:
At Sigma7, we support you in enhancing loss prevention and risk management strategies, ensuring you are as prepared as possible before a hurricane strikes. To learn more about this service or to discover how our team of forensic accountants can assist you if the unexpected does occur and financial recovery is required – click here.
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Authors: Lyndsay Close; Kelly A. Frey
Introducing Sigma7. We are building a new kind of risk services platform to enhance value for the world’s most prominent and complex businesses. Our mission is to help organizations create competitive advantage through actionable risk insights and business outcomes. We work globally across risk domains, apply modern technologies, and integrate the services of respected specialist brands in risk services.
We provide executive-level attention from preeminent risk experts, connecting risk profiles to the organization’s strategy and tactical operations.
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