Save Your Company from Bird Flu:
101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic Flu

If — or maybe we should say when — a pandemic event occurs, whether from bird flu or another agent, how well will your company perform? What will happen to your operations if 15-35% of your employees (according to an estimate of the US Centers for Disease Control) either do not report for work or fall ill? What will happen to your company afterwards if 5% of your employees die or are permanently disabled?

Most businesses and government agencies have some form of operational continuity plan in place. The typical plan is more than eighteen months old, and it was designed for a natural disaster — a tornado, hurricane, earthquake or fire. Most operational continuity plans are either outmoded or inapplicable to pandemic events.

Organizations that deal with pandemic flu successfully will be those that have done more than produce a plan and file it away.

The three keys to organizational survival in a pandemic event are continuous planning, periodic exercises, and making pandemic awareness a part of normal operations.

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How To OrderIs your organization fully prepared for pandemic flu? Do you have new products scheduled for release in the next eighteen months? Have you considered what a pandemic event might do to your plans? Does your organization operate one or more centralized data centers? Do you know what will happen if one of those data centers is ordered closed by local health authorities? These are just some of this issues you might have to face if pandemic influenza develops, or if a pandemic emergency is declared. 101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic Flu gives you tips for planning for, managing and recovering from pandemic flu events.

What you'll learn

Read 101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic Flu to learn techniques for preparing for and managing pandemic incidents — tips and insights that could take you a lifetime to invent on your own. You'll learn, for example:

• Novel approaches for adapting your facilities to make them pandemic-resistant
• What aspects of your own operations to monitor during a pandemic event
• What to anticipate in terms of legal consequences, from pandemic alert to pandemic aftermath, and how best to prepare for it
• How to incorporate pandemic response planning into your marketing planning right now
• What to do to minimize the impact of pandemic events on financing and financial planning
• Devices and procedures you can put in place today that will make communications far more effective in a pandemic emergency

Who can benefit

This tips book addresses a broad readership:

• Organizational leaders who want to guide sponsors and leaders of pandemic response planning teams within their organizations
• Sponsors of pandemic response planning teams who want solid results faster
• Leaders of pandemic response planning teams who want to adjust their approaches to the latest thinking about what to anticipate during each stage of the pandemic
• Members of pandemic response planning teams who want to develop plans that will meet the needs of their organizations

What you do with it depends on your role in your organization. Here are just two ideas:

Organizational leaders

If you've chartered a pandemic response planning team, make sure the team lead sees a copy. Have a conversation about the comparison between what the team is producing and what kinds of suggestions you find in the ebook.

Leaders of pandemic response planning teams

Use the ebook as the basis for a conversation or brainstorming session. Explore those ideas that are good fits, and talk about how some others might be modified to fit your needs.

What's in this ebook

This ebook includes a range of suggestions for configuring your organization to survive, and even to thrive, in the pandemic environment. It's packed with tips and techniques for:

• Developing a Strategy for Pandemic Flu
• Making Your Facilities Pandemic-Resistant
• Making Your Operations Pandemic-Resistant
• What to Do When a Pandemic Is Declared
• What to Do When the Pandemic Reaches Your Company or Facility
• Planning for the Aftermath

And it's all packaged in a single, compact ebook. Load it onto your Acrobat-enabled tablet, smartphone, or laptop and carry it with you on your next trip.

Some sample tips

Here are some sample tips.

Document your planning efforts and preparation activities

If your facility is hit especially hard, the stricken and their survivors might feel that the organization and its management contributed in some way to the unusual incidence of disease in your facility. Legal action by those stricken, their survivors, shareholders, customers, vendors or neighbors might follow. Any defense against such action will be more effective if you've maintained a clear record of dedicated effort, management commitment, generous expenditure, and prudent action.

Consider rescheduling securities offerings

New offerings scheduled further out than the immediate future risk appearing in the midst of a pandemic event. Bring them closer in, or push them further out, recognizing that pushing them out will likely put you in a very long queue, if a pandemic materializes. Whether or not rescheduling seems like a good idea right now to you, it will seem so to some; those who act earliest will benefit the most.

Eliminate public pens

Eliminate the pen at building guest sign in, or anyplace where you now provide public pens. Let people use their own pens. If they need pens, give them pens to keep, or provide a drop slot for collecting pens after a single use, and then disinfect them before handing them out again.

Encourage people to use sick leave

The single policy change that will provide the most encouragement to people to actually stay home when they're sick is to increase the days of sick allowance, and to segregate sick leave from vacation and holiday time. In other words, eliminate the use of, or create a less favorable exchange rate for, the use of sick days as vacation time. Second best idea: do not pay for unused sick days in the event of termination or retirement, and don't let them accumulate indefinitely. Cap their accumulation, or let them expire after a decent period.

Table of contents

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How to order

This item requires Adobe Acrobat 6.0 or later or Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0 or later. You can load it onto your computer or mobile device. Or print it on any standard black-and-white or color printer. Price: per copy. Quantity packs are available at the prices shown below. Call for site license pricing at the phone number below.

Order 101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic Flu by credit card, for each, using our secure server, and receive download instructions by return email.

This item is also available in a 10-pack (USD 249.95 per pack, or USD 25.00 per copy):

Order 101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic Flu, 10-pack by credit card, for each, using our secure server, and receive download instructions by return email.

Or as a 50-pack (USD 999.00 per pack, or USD 19.98 per copy):

Order 101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic Flu, 50-pack by credit card, for each, using our secure server, and receive download instructions by return email.

Or as a 100-pack (USD 1,695.00 per pack, or USD 16.95 per copy):

Order 101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic Flu, 100-pack by credit card, for each, using our secure server, and receive download instructions by return email.

Or as a 500-pack (USD 6,995.00 per pack, or USD 13.99 per copy):

Order 101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic Flu, 500-pack by credit card, for each, using our secure server, and receive download instructions by return email.