Tag: Business Disruptions

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An HR Teams article to Emergency Communication Software

An HR Teams article to Emergency Communication Software-zapoj.com

It’s an HR Team’s responsibility to make sure that they communicate effectively with their employees. In this blog, we’ll outline how to do this as best as possible.

Introduction

Research reveals that companies with effective communication strategies have a 47 percent greater return to shareholders and are 50 percent more likely to report below average turnover levels. Modern emergency communication systems enable HR leaders to keep employees safe, informed, and connected when it matters most. But at a time when budgets are tight and every investment must be justified, HR departments simply can’t afford to invest in one-trick pony platforms. Any technology solution must be versatile, flexible, and adaptable in order for organizations to get the most use and the greatest benefit out of their investment. Fortunately, emergency communication systems have many practical applications for both the HR function and the organization as a whole. And contrary to what might be assumed from its name, these systems aren’t just valuable in emergencies.

Why Do HR Teams Need an Emergency Communication System?

Prior to 2020, most of us had never heard the term “coronavirus,” let alone developed emergency response and communication plans for it. But today there is virtually no industry or business that will be left untouched by the global pandemic. It has been a jarring reminder that no organization in any corner of the globe is immune to the occurrence of unexpected disasters. The first and most obvious way HR teams can use emergency communication technology is to support and protect employees when disaster strikes. With multi-channel, two-way emergency communication capabilities, HR teams can rapidly send and receive secure notifications across multiple channels-even from a mobile device-to keep employees safe and informed.

While the specific threats will vary by location and industry-and this list certainly isn’t all-inclusive-emergency communication software can be used to effectively manage and minimize the impact of the following types of emergency event

  •  Natural disasters (hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, wildfires, etc.)
  • Severe weather (winter storms, high winds, extreme heat waves, floods, etc.)
  • Pandemics and disease out break Facility emergencies(structure fires, hazardous leaks or spills, etc
  • Acts of violence (active shooters, bomb threats, terrorist attacks, etc.)
  • Civil disturbances (protests, riots, strikes, etc.).
  • It’s important to note that while HR teams have traditionally relied on email to relay time-sensitive information, there are

several problems with using only email to communicate with employees during critical events. Emails do not evoke the sense of urgency needed in emergency situations and they typically don’t garner the same level of attention as a text alert or similar form of communication. Emails are easily missed due to the sheer volume of email many employees now receive. In a true emergency, employees may not even have access to their email. In addition, hourly or front-line employees may not have a company email address at all or, even if they do, do not check it on their personal phones outside of business hours. How will these employees be notified of office closures or delayed openings if a severe storm or facility-related issue happens overnight? An emergency communication system that can reliably and accurately reach all employees—via email, text, voice call, mobile app push, and even social media—is the only way to ensure everybody gets the messages they need, when they need them. The right emergency communication system can help any organization reach all of its employees, near and far, with critical information and notifications instantly. It should not matter where employees are, how they work, or what device they are using. A good system will ensure everyone gets the messages they need when they need them.

Advantages of using emergency communication system over traditional email are as follow & gt;

  • Instant communications
  • Two-way communications
  • Event monitoring
  • Real-time communications
  • Multi-channel communications
  • Measurement tools with analytics and reporting

Mass Communication System is “NOT” just for emergency

One important but often overlooked use of an emergency communication system is maintaining accurate, up-to-date employee contact information, which is vital to an effective response in the event of a true emergency. Using an emergency communication system, organizations can send out a notification to employees every few months instructing them to respond if they receive the message. HR can then follow up directly with those who don’t respond to verify whether their contact information has changed.

When considering your employee communication needs and the many ways an emergency communication system could benefit your organization, it’s also important to reframe your perspective on what constitutes an “emergency.” After all, there are many threats that aren’t an emergency in the traditional sense but could have a significant impact on your people, your business, and your bottom line.

In fact, many organizations find the system is more of a mass communication system than strictly for emergencies. The system can be used in any situation where a group or a large number of employees need information.
Some of the more interesting ways a communication system can be used are with logistics and scheduling. Generally, organizations with scheduled shift workers and/or fleet drivers have to manage a lot of moving parts. Using the system to communicate back and forth with these employees can be much more efficient than most dispatch systems.

Event planning, guest communications, and volunteer coordination are all eased with a mass communication system. Again, because the system can engage people across channels and devices, messages, alerts, notifications, and tips can all be received more reliably. Some organizations are foregoing time-consuming email newsletters for instant notifications using a mass communication system. People can opt-in to receive:

  • Weather-related notifications that may impact classes, events, or
  • games
  • Traffic alerts
  • Members-only notifications
  • Billing alerts
  • Venue changes
  • Silent auction alerts
  • Event updates and reminders
  • Parking tips
  • Closing or delays
  • Shipping notifications
  • Appointments/reservation reminders
  • Guest/customer/employee surveys, in general
  • Customer/employee satisfaction surveys
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Maximize the ROI of Your Emergency Communication System

With a modern emergency communication system, organizations can quickly and easily communicate with their people to improve employee safety and maintain business continuity when emergencies strike. And by extending the use of an emergency communication system to non-emergency events—including day-to-day HR, IT, and operational communication needs—organizations can get even more value out of their chosen solution, reaping tangible, company-wide benefits that can improve the return on their technology investment. And by investing in a technology solution that can help the entire organization communicate more effectively, HR can prove itself to be the strategic, innovative business partner every organization needs in these challenging times

Need more information about Zapoj? Schedule a demo today.

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Leading the way through supply chain disruptions to empower oil and gas companies

The unprecedented catastrophe from the spread of COVID-19 disease has brought massive insecurity to the supply of oil and gas globally. Social distancing is the biggest cause to affect global logistics, and material handling down the upstream, midstream, and downstream sectors. The scenario is resulting in supply chain disruptions that are likely to increase the demand as long as the disease stays around. With COVID interfering with the normal operations of the supply chain, the ability to handle usual critical events is becoming challenging due to the convergence of social distancing norms.

Aside from the world leaders in different industries, leaders in the oil and gas industries also have learned about the growing vulnerabilities to supply chain operations. Rather than watching the risk continue growing, they understand that supply chain resilience is key to meeting the global demand. Having access to location data, they can get contextual value from the data and understand potential impacts on the supply chain. At the same time, visualizing data improves collaboration across daily activities. Oil and gas producers, storage service providers, traders, or fleet operators can unify together and discuss whether their respective activities would be delayed or continued.

For supply chain resiliency, leaders need situational awareness combined with the power of location intelligence that easily allows harnessing data to achieve contexts and gain improved decision-making capabilities. With Zapoj, a critical event management tool, leaders can tap potential into all of the essential features to maintain business continuity and resilience during each step of the supply chain vulnerability. Here’s how.

Visual risk intelligence for supply chain risk monitoring

Visual risk intelligence for supply chain risk monitoring

While the supply of global production has taken a hit, future exploration and production also have sustained disruptions due to the inadequate supply of equipment, parts, including other significant machinery pieces. In addition, the decline in workforce strength made it difficult for the C-level executives to maintain operational efficiency all across the plants.

Oil and gas engineering and procurement are moving from one specific location to other locations – and suppliers and subcontractors are increasingly feeling a strong need for supply chain resilience and risk intelligence to help their operational process better anticipate future risk and build their strategy accordingly.

The ability to mitigate supply chain risk can leverage efficiencies when leaders can detect threat actors along their supply routes and achieve an active emergency communication system.

Zapoj builds situational awareness by pulling together unstructured data and making them easily recognizable through analysis. Presenting them through a common operating picture gives leaders the flexibility to know the real-time critical weather conditions and their impacts on the routes that could probably result in disruptions in supply chain operations.

The assets or logistics vehicles- that could be possibly at risk are easily visible through location intelligence. By gaining insights into all of the critical assets and business processes across to the supply path, leaders can better utilize the built-in emergency alerting system to build contextual awareness and effectively help the right people get prepared.

As they discover unfolding situations in real-time, optimizing logistics routes becomes twice as faster as they could do and maximize workforce efficiency and productivity that would otherwise get affected by misinformation and lack of visualization.

Shared insights into the next step of the emergency preparedness Shared insights into the next step of the emergency preparedness

During an emergency, decision-making accuracy is key to having fewer impacts on the evolving situations while preventing threats to hit the bottom line. Shared views into the disasters help each other develop a better understanding of the scenarios and devise a better strategy to minimize risks.

Regardless of the location of the emergency response teams – where they are and what the time is in the location, Zapoj escalates emergency notifications to any device the emergency team utilizes.

Unified by scalable communication and collaboration tools, the leaders can bring together all of its emergency response team to the same platform- where they can analyze data via visual command center building a common operating picture for everyone. The system can help oil and gas companies visualize the situations and prepare enhanced insights together. Data-driven decisions help them reinforce their facilities or empower their people ahead of time. Allocating resources for critical event management in areas where floods will increase or fire will break out can provide appropriate risk mitigation support.

They can also foresee critical factors about how could storm impact or slow ship movement or logistics movement on the land. Based on the findings in real-time, they can predict events likely to occur and reduce their probable risks.

In a time where oil and gas industries need risk monitoring capabilities in supply chain management, Zapoj has ideally brought the efficient features to help mitigate supply chain risks. The unprecedented risks from a variety of critical situations may be beyond the scope of leaders in terms of their unpredictability and most frequent characteristics. Making it simpler to find patterns and trends in supply chain risks using visual risk intelligence gives leaders an enhanced way to reduce costs and increase efficiency for risk mitigation.

Leaders can be in the know in every step of the supply chain processes so that they can handle situations better. The visual risk intelligence, location technology, situation awareness, and the best performant unified communication capabilities keep every member of the supply chain operation informed and get them better prepared for handling incidents.

The supply chain resiliency becomes more powerful with Zapoj as leaders can turn their oil and gas production into scalable and agile businesses. As a result, Zapoj saves cost, expedites profit, and adds value to operations.

Want to know how Zapj can fit your existing system and enhance operation capability by mitigating unpredictable vulnerabilities? Schedule a call today.

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10 reasons why organizations need critical communications

Top 10 reasons why organizations need to have critical communications

Is your business resilient? It leaves us puzzled with no correct answer to reply to it. The impact of COVID-19 has us struggling to cope with the evolving situations, whereas we already have some familiar critical events like severe weather, supply chain disruptions, workplace violence, and lots more to cause business disruption while exposing our people and assets to potential threats. Business crisis communication plans are the key to prevent future threats. But, without a robust business-critical communication tool organizations cannot activate this strategy.

What are critical communications? What is their importance before, during, and after critical events?

Critical communications are the ability to communicate appropriately with your people when you need it most before, during, and after critical events like a pandemic, supply chain disruptions, bad weather, flood, cyber-attacks, or any other industrial events.

During these evolving times, a legacy system falls short of delivering reliable, consistent, secure, and easy-to-use critical communication flexibility.

Critical communications that easily allow businesses to leverage the advanced level of mission-critical communication flexibilities along with data visualization can help emergency response teams communicate with people in the field or onsite in a much better way. However, not only the emergency response team, chief security officers, chief information security officers need critical communication in IT departments, no matter what the verticals are.

Hence, your critical communications can become faster and your recovery process can deliver expected results.

A critical communication tool must have lots of solutions and features to solve problems arising from critical events on the ground, office, or anywhere.

Zsuite, a comprehensive CEM or Critical Management platform is designed to process threats, analyze their nature, and foster ways to handle your business crisis communication plans to mitigate threats on time.

As a leading CEM tool, Zsuite takes an initiative to advocate for the importance of critical communications for businesses and encourages why businesses should not overlook this critical matter. Here are 10 reasons why organizations need to have critical communications.

Data intelligence

Today, critical events are fast evolving, frequently occurring, and complicated too. Different types of critical events can be coincidental, creating challenges to review data using legacy systems. In most organizations, emergency response teams still follow the manual process of data gathering. This process is rigid and making assessment and validation of information is tough. As a result, organizations cannot visualize threats and add context to emergency communications. There is a high chance that key intelligence would go haywire.

Zsuite CEM platform is a critical communication enabler with a granular level of focus on data intelligence, making your critical communications much more efficient and reliable at times of emergency.

Scalable decision-making

Most organizations still rely on siloed systems to handle crisis communications. Although security teams or emergency response teams are available 24×7, they do not have an integrated communication tool to enable crisis communications and keep everyone informed about changing situations. This is in fact leading to more gruesome challenges as organizations fail to identify exact business threats and take measures for risk handling. Lack of coordination between teams gives rise to confusion, impedes situational awareness, and delays appropriate decision-making.Many crisis communication tools like Zsuite help you make efficient emergency plans and tackle immediate pressure with scalable decision-making.

Message fatigue

A crisis communication plan must include an integrated and unified communication system. This kind of orchestration not only improves communication and collaboration but provides visibility into who has been reached out, when they have been connected, how has been that person contacted, and what feedback has it received. Also, it provides the capability of leveraging pre-built message templates which are consistent and do not cause message fatigue.As with fragmented communication channels that are omnipresent in many organizations, they can be subject to message fatigue.

Administrative overhead

Critical events can never be limited to a certain region. The reason is the advancement of digitalization. The information erupts as fast as wildfire through social media, personal messages, emails, news, and different entities among others. Messages can be voluminous, repetitive, and incessant resulting in wrong interpretation of certain messages and add to panic buying. Organizations need to coordinate with their people to give them real-time and fact-filled critical information to keep them informed so as to avoid unintended consequences.Zsuite CEM enables two-way communication via multiple channels and improves organizational response.

Direct communication

Critical communication is always direct, consistent, and contextual. But, when your legacy system does not allow you to nurture the advantage to edit and approve of messages to be used as pre-built critical messages, you tend to impede human intelligence to take charge and act more responsibly. Using a Zsuite CEM platform, you can build your emergency response to help avoid ambiguity while also keeping everyone informed. This can be the most effective means of critical communication that enables a faster recovery process.

Better coordination

The right crisis communication plan can focus on coordination strategy. Having the right tool that allows you to enhance your critical communication can help you collaborate easily with all your stakeholders internally and externally and your people. Zsuite enables you to collaborate and communicate effectively so as to allocate resources better and act as necessary. This can add to better organizational resiliency.

Multimodal communication channels

Before, during, and after critical events, stakeholders must ensure their assets should not be in harm’s way. To ensure your people are safe, you must reach them at an incident site at the right time. No matter what device your people use, the idea is to reach them, so they never miss critical information. However, connecting does not always mean it is over. People receiving the message have to understand it and make a reply. Critical communication tools that integrate multiple languages allow communicating at ease while two-way communication brings feedback at a lightning speed, ensuring plans are being strategized as designed.

Contextual and location-awareness

Not all CEM is built to derive location intelligence to help reach people in harm’s way and save them. Zsuite CEM enhances its critical communication ability by leveraging the power of location intelligence and contextual awareness.

Zsuite relies upon location data it fetches from its contact centers, which helps provide visualization and analysis of geographical data. Also, by drawing spaces in the smart map in the dashboard and integrating it with demographic, traffic, and weather data, you can gain location awareness and add context to your critical communication so that you can predict the potential of threats, take appropriate action, and help save your people.

Accurate analysis

Powerful crisis communication can provide visibility into the incident’s nature, its causes, and its effects. Which part of your organization was badly damaged? How is it impacting spaces and life outside of your organization? Using Zsuite, your crisis management or incident management team can gain a better understanding of loopholes and prepare a better version of internal and external recovery plans with necessary inputs from stakeholders. It improves your monitoring of the factors impeding your recovery strategy and lessens the impact of disasters.

Plan and test your recovery plan

Critical communications enabled by a CEM platform such as Zsuite can help you run drills and evaluate the scope of your plans and their efficacy before a disaster happens. As you practice with simulations of critical events such as earthquakes, IT Incidents, terrorist attacks, or hurricanes, your emergency response teams can enhance their crisis communication plans, be prepared for the next disaster, and be more proactive to mitigate its threats.

Critical communications are the backbone of business resiliency. In the event of a crisis, crisis communication tools scale and give robust communication flexibility that can narrow the gap between life and death.

Are you prepared to handle critical events? Schedule a demo today.