Your fire alarm goes off.  The sirens blare, the strobe lights flash, and some sort of mechanized voice keeps informing you that there is a fire and you must go to the nearest exit.  Most of the people in the facility do exactly that – head for the nearest exit.  But what about your facilities staff?  What are they doing?

I can see them now, calmly going to the emergency procedure manual, carefully reviewing the index to select the right procedure, then diligently reading and checking off each step in the procedure precisely as they were trained.  Never mind that the two-page procedure incorporates a 4-page checklist that would take an hour to complete, if it were actually up to date.  (Well, maybe you could consider the procedure up to date if you include the five Post-It notes on various pages that add the few minor things that were left out of the original procedure – little reminders like remember to check the power to the backup system and the current facility manager’s correct cell phone number.

The reality is that, when the alarm goes off, your facilities staff – like most people – will fall back on their training and experience.  Generally speaking, the first thing they will do is check the alarm system for the alarming location.  In most cases, they will next send someone to the site to see if there really is a fire or smoke.  They will communicate and work with security personnel.  They will let the alarm monitoring company know whether or not they need to dispatch the fire trucks.  Once someone determines whether the fire is real – and it’s usually not real – they pass the word and wait for the fire trucks to come so they can reset the alarm.  They will call the alarm company to repair or investigate the issue.  Finally, after everything has been taken care of, someone will break out the procedure to make sure that the requirements were met.

Of all the ways your facilities staff could respond to a fire alarm, referring to the procedure manual is not likely to be high on the list.  In fact, it’s conspicuously absent from the list – predictably so.  So why don’t people use the procedures they have?  The answer to that question is more complex than time and space allow, but the simplistic answer is that the procedures are not useful and don’t work in real-life situations. 

Recognizing that people fall back on their training and experience during times of emergency reinforces the need for proper training.  So we can agree that, in order to prepare your facilities personnel to respond properly to emergencies, you must train them.  It follows, then, that the training must integrate the process that needs to be followed to address the emergency.  It’s impossible to address every conceivable event in procedures and training, so you train on the most probable scenarios.  It’s also impossible to predict how an actual emergency will unfold and how unpredictable events will affect performance. 

You cannot write a procedure to cover every conceivable event.  And even if you could, people wouldn’t use it anyway.  Your procedures and training need to work with natural human behavior in order to be successful; so at Sapient, we recommend that the procedures you write for emergencies be in the form of an Emergency Response Guide, or ERG, that helps people remember the most important tasks that must be completed for the most probable situations.  Additionally, these guidelines need to work seamlessly with the training that you provide.

What is it that mission critical staff really need during times of emergency?

• Information they can use
• Quick and easy-to-use guides

Based upon these needs, we developed the following format to use in concert with our training program:

A.    Initiating Condition(s):  In this section is the condition(s) that requires a person to perform the immediate actions.  For example, seeing a fire in the data center would cause a person to perform the immediate actions for a fire.

B.    Immediate Action(s):  These are the action steps required when the initiating condition(s) has been met.  For example, in the fire scenario mentioned above, one of the immediate actions would be to ensure that the fire alarm is initiated or is sounding.

C.    Supplemental Action(s):  This section lists those actions that may be appropriate for the situation but which might not be appropriate for all situations.  An example of this, continuing with the fire example, would be to verify that customers have been notified.  While this may sound like an immediate action, immediate actions typically deal with life/safety and facility-protection issues.

All of this is written on one page and only on one side.  This is an important concept.  Emergency Response Guides or ERGs need to be easy to identify, carry, and use.  Think of a laminated one-page guide.  They should be integral to the training program and their use required in drills/practice.  It should become one of your organizational cultures that, when emergent situations appear, grabbing the ERG is an immediate action.

In addition to making it a cultural thing to grab the ERG, in training, we make it a requirement to memorize the five most likely ERGs and their immediate actions.  We do this because, in emergent situations, success favors the prepared – and you simply don’t know if you will be able to get to the ERG.

When dealing with people, it’s necessary to design processes that work with natural human behavior.  Look at your procedures and ask yourself, Are they helping or hindering?  Better yet, ask the people that have to use them.