How AlertMedia Communicates With Employees During Emergencies

Last month, historic winter storms ravaged the state of Texas and left millions without power, heat, and water for days. The resulting damages are expected to cost more than $20 billion, ensuring that the storm’s greater impact will be felt for months.

“We lost power on Sunday, and we didn’t get it back until the end of the week,” said Zach Balod, Senior Account Executive with AlertMedia. “While that in and of itself might not have been a problem, we then had three pipes burst, and flooding in our master bedroom, closet, and garage. We are currently living with a friend, and it will likely be at least 2-3 weeks before we can move back in.”

Several other employees at AlertMedia found themselves in similar situations, and as a company, we witnessed firsthand just how dangerous and disruptive severe weather events can be.

We feel grateful to work among a group of people so willing to step up in times of crisis, but we also learned a valuable lesson: no one is immune to emergencies, not even AlertMedia, a provider of software and services to other businesses to help them weather the storm (literally).

So, while the experience is still fresh, we thought it would be helpful to share how we leverage our own emergency communications system to keep our employees safe, informed, and connected throughout the course of the winter storms, and what we learned along the way.

Activating Our Response Plan

Late Sunday evening, as entire neighborhoods began losing power amid increasing snowfall and rapid temperature drops, we immediately put our crisis management plan into action, following the necessary steps to ensure employee safety.

Step #1: Convene leadership

When faced with needing to make decisions fast, it’s important to get your leaders on the same page.

Our leadership team convened on a conference call, during which they discussed each of our options and best course of action knowing a large percentage of our team would be impacted as conditions worsened across the state. In addition to agreeing on how and when to communicate with employees throughout the storm, a cross-functional group of leaders also reviewed continuity plans for support teams knowing normal staffing levels would be impacted by prolonged power outages.

“It was such a relief to learn our leadership team put my safety as a priority and understood there was no way to do my job without having basic essentials,” said Jo Storrie, customer success manager at AlertMedia. “And those who did have power were so helpful, generous, and all around supportive.”

“Just knowing that someone at the company was worried about us meant a lot,” continued Zach Balod.

Step #2: Ensure employee contact information is up to date

Once our leadership team aligned on next steps, we made sure to review employee phone numbers and email addresses. 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.

AlertMedia syncs with our Active Directory, which means even as employees come and go, the system keeps contacts automatically updated and accurate, so when it comes time to send notifications, we can rest easy knowing all employees will be kept informed of an event.

Step 3: Conduct daily wellness checks

During an emergency, crisis response leaders need the ability to both communicate out information and receive feedback back from employees. To get a better understanding of how many employees were without power, internet, and water, we sent out daily surveys every morning.

Lessons Learned

As we worked through our emergency preparedness playbook, three key lessons stood out to us as having been particularly vital to helping us continue business operations and stay in constant contact with employees and customers.

Lesson #1: Messaging templates accelerate communication

A crucial piece of planning for emergencies includes creating emergency notification message templates. We offer a variety of examples to our customers, so we simply updated the most relevant template to address the current situation. Having access to these templates not only saved us time and bandwidth, but it allowed us to focus on more pressing needs, including proactively getting ahead of additional risks like road safety and identifying locations of warming shelters. A great example of the templates we used can be found here.

Lesson #2: Multichannel communication is critical, especially when infrastructure fails

Due to the power outages, not every employee had access to a computer and internet, and many suffered from poor cell connectivity, so we couldn’t simply send one email or one text to communicate. Instead, we relied on multichannel communication, sending notifications out via email, phone, SMS text, and in-app push notifications. Corresponding on multiple platforms also makes employees more likely to see the message and that no one slips through the cracks.

“It was nice that I was able to get updates and respond via multiple channels,” said Jo Storrie. “If I didn’t want to use up a lot of data or power, I could simply respond quickly via text. Then, when I was able to charge my phone and computer, I could choose to get more updates within the application, including a map view that showed current outages.”

Lesson #3: Real-time analytics and reporting enables informed decision making

As we continued to receive updates from employees on whether or not they had power, we created a list with their corresponding status so that managers could easily and quickly see who may need assistance. When time is of the essence, streamlining the notification process allows you to communicate and act much more efficiently.

We also triaged the people who didn’t respond, so rather than placing the burden on managers to call every employee, we instead used the surveys to isolate non-responsive individuals and focused our efforts on the smaller group to confirm their safety.

“I was lucky to always have access to both my house and a friend’s home that had power, heat, and water, and I could alternate between both,” said Sofia Covarrubias. “But when I did lose power in the middle of the day on Wednesday, my director was able to quickly step in and help while I adjusted and relocated.”

Final Word

For many of our employees, they saw our mission statement come to life for the first time. We aim to save lives and minimize loss by facilitating timely, accurate, and relevant communications when an emergency situation threatens personal safety and business continuity, all of which we successfully managed a few weeks ago.