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

Swine Flu might never strike. But if it does, how well will your company withstand it? By planning now, and by making small changes in your operations and planned activities, you can actually gain market share if a pandemic event occurs.

If — or maybe we Skip to the Details:
How To Order
should say when — a pandemic event occurs, whether from swine 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?

101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic Swine FluMost 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.

A swine flu pandemic might be a little different, because some organizations did prepare a plan for a bird flu pandemic. Those plans are close to what we need for a swine flu event, differing only in some details. But they aren't quite right.

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.

Is your organization fully prepared for pandemic swine flu? Do you have new products scheduled for release in the near future? 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 the issues you might have to face if pandemic swine flu develops, or if a pandemic emergency is declared. 101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic H1N1 Swine Flu gives you tips for planning for, managing and recovering from a pandemic swine flu event.

What you'll learn

101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic Swine FluRead 101 Tips for Preparing for Pandemic H1N1 Swine Flu to learn techniques for preparing for and managing a pandemic swine flu incident — 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 swine flu 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
  • How to quickly adapt your pandemic bird flu plan to pandemic swine flu

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 tips book.
Leaders of pandemic response planning teams
Use the tips book 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.

Why I chose to publish this book as an ebook

Ebooks offer the reader several advantages:

Ebooks are searchable
If you want to find a passage that uses a particular word or phrase, you can use the search function of your reader to find it very easily. This means I don't have to write an index, which enables me to publish it more rapidly, and to update it more easily. And indices don't always have the words you want anyway.
You can carry it wherever you carry your reader
If you use your laptop, tablet, or mobile device as your reader, you can carry your ebook with you without additional weight or space. Great for people who travel, or who find themselves waiting for a meeting to start or for an appointment.
Ebooks are cheaper than hardcopy
Many of my ebooks serve a very specialized audience. To provide equivalent content in hardcopy would require unsustainably high pricing.
Ebooks enable me to address rapidly-varying subject matter
Change is accelerating. Many of my topic areas are changing so rapidly that the time to publish hardcopy is too long — the content would be obsolete before the book would be available.

The economics of e-publishing enable me to offer you free updates for one year from your purchase date. If a title you purchase is updated within that year, you'll receive an update automatically.

What's in this tips book

This tips book 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 Swine 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 mobile devices 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.

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. The price makes the decision easy: 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 H1N1 Swine 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 H1N1 Swine 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 H1N1 Swine 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 H1N1 Swine 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 H1N1 Swine Flu, 500-pack by credit card, for each, using our secure server, and receive download instructions by return email.

This book has an ISBN of 978-1-938932-15-1.

Table of contents

Click the folder icons to reveal (or hide) individual chapter content summaries, or:

  • 1Understand what a pandemic is
  • 2Have a pandemic response plan
  • 3Set appropriate goals
  • 4Document your planning efforts and preparation activities
  • 5Establish an advisory review board for public statements
  • 6Know WHO's six phases of pandemic response
  • 7Establish a pandemic reserve
  • 8Assume that vaccines will be unavailable
  • 9Plan for border closures and quarantines
  • 10Plan not for business continuity — plan for business discontinuity
  • 11Intentionally choose to operate less profitably
  • 12Defer relocations that are intended to unite dispersed facilities
  • 13Monitor employee rights
  • 14Suspend your JIT inventory strategy
  • 15Defer image realignment
  • 16Consider rescheduling securities offerings
  • 17Consider rescheduling new product offerings
  • 18Encourage people to use sick leave
  • 19Prepare emergency facilities
  • 20Cooperate with other facilities
  • 21Cooperate with local authorities
  • 22Document, document, document
  • 23Offer home preparedness training
  • 24Exploit opportunities for seasonal facilities
  • 25Suspend some projects now
  • 26Include the pandemic in project risk plans
  • 27Devise a plan for urgent suspension of projects
  • 28Drill, drill, drill
  • 29Know the risks of communications trees
  • 30Re-establish contact with retired or former employees
  • 31Favor solo decision makers over committees
  • 32Designate roles by code name
  • 33Create communication infrastructure for code names
  • 34Install excess data center capacity
  • 35Suspend self-service food stations
  • 36Eliminate public pens
  • 37Increase use of fresh air
  • 38Use the overnight to purge used air
  • 39Upgrade the air filtration system
  • 40Increase the refresh rate in elevators
  • 41Use touchless elevator controls
  • 42Use no-contact or low-contact access control technology
  • 43Install thermal scanners
  • 44Use motion sensors to actuate outside doors
  • 45Use touchless technologies in lavatories
  • 46Review supplier agreements
  • 47Reconfigure your supply chain
  • 48Anticipate absenteeism
  • 49Encourage telecommuting
  • 50Replace meetings with conference calls
  • 51Expand network capacity
  • 52Expand facility telephone capacity
  • 53Set priorities for telecommuting and telemeetings
  • 54Prepare to seal some facilities
  • 55Replace scheduled air services with private services
  • 56Replace air travel with virtual travel
  • 57Educate employees about disease transmission
  • 58Ask air travelers to request fresh gloves
  • 59Advise travelers to carry medical kits
  • 60Encourage employees to shop on-line
  • 61Wave, smile, and nod
  • 62Treat coming to work sick as a performance issue
  • 63Ensure access to critical documents
  • 64Ensure access to necessary contact information
  • 65Increase cash and currency reserves
  • 66Increase staff reserves
  • 67Increase inventories of critical supplies
  • 68Review succession planning
  • 69Renew passports
  • 70Communicate
  • 71Understand the 4/8 protocol
  • 72Review existing plans
  • 73Establish an event monitoring team
  • 74Have an alternate transport plan
  • 75Have a multi-stage response plan
  • 76Escalate standards in food service safety
  • 77Seal pre-designated facilities
  • 78Invoke pandemic clauses in cleaning services contracts
  • 79Stagger shifts
  • 80Stagger lunchtimes
  • 81Encourage people to eat lunch at their desks or outside
  • 82Encourage employees to avoid public transport
  • 83Recognize that the virus will likely target demographic groups selectively
  • 84Defer face-to-face training in non-critical topics
  • 85Advise employees to defer family gatherings
  • 86Advise employees to defer routine medical treatment
  • 87Encourage employees to defer vacations
  • 88Consider defenses against intentional infection
  • 89Have flexible leave policies
  • 90Plan for grief counseling
  • 91Suspend non-critical activities
  • 92Monitor waste management
  • 93Ensure graceful power-up and power-down
  • 94Consider offering expertise and labor to local authorities
  • 95Have a procedure for dealing with employees who become ill at work
  • 96Announce deaths in batches
  • 97Anticipate an increase in customer service load
  • 98Assume that you'll be one of the few left standing
  • 99Plan for a spike in load on your legal offices
  • 100Remember the fallen
  • 101Recognize heroic efforts

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