How to Create an Emergency Evacuation Plan [+ Template]

“When the fire alarm rings, nobody runs to the wall and looks at the evacuation map,” explains JoAnn Dankert, Senior Safety Consultant at the National Safety Council. Joann shared her insights on The Employee Safety Podcast. “We want to have the procedures embedded into our memory, and you want more than one way to exit the building or location.”

With an emergency evacuation plan template, it’s easy to build an evacuation plan you can practice so your team will have a safe response imprinted in their minds and muscle memories. That way, when they go into survival mode, they don’t forget things in the rush. When you train your team in emergency evacuation protocols, you reduce the delay, hesitation, and misguided actions that could put your people at risk of injury or even death. You can create your plan in just a few steps to start practicing and get your team ready to respond safely to the next emergency.

9 Steps to Build Your Emergency Evacuation Plan

Here are the nine steps it takes to develop your building emergency evacuation plan using a template. Download a free template here to get started with a thorough emergency plan.

1. Find your potential evacuation risks

2. Determine your evacuation routes

Next, map out your evacuation routes. Your escape routes should be the quickest and safest ways out of the building or job site. There should be ample room for building occupants to move through the route, and it should be clear of obstacles at all times. If you are evacuating multiple floors, use stairwells rather than elevators, which may create delays and even malfunction and trap people in the very place they are attempting to evacuate. Consult with building management to determine the fastest and safest ways out of the building.

3. Chose an assembly point

Identify a safe assembly point for employees to gather outside of the building. This assembly point should be at least 500 feet away from the threat. There should be plenty of space for everyone to gather so you can perform a head count and double-check that everyone got out safely.

For specific emergencies where evacuation might be interrupted by the need to shelter in place, such as with an active shooter event, identify multiple areas of refuge where people can wait safely until their path is clear again.

4. Post evacuation maps

Once you have your exit routes and assembly point, create a visual map of the evacuation routes using your specific floor plan that shows where people should go. Mark stairwells, egress doors, emergency exits, and areas of refuge, and mark the route clearly on the map. Then, post these maps in common areas across your facility. Break rooms, common spaces, and frequented hallways are good places to post them since they are easy to access.

5. Document the evacuation procedures

The next step is to document your emergency evacuation procedures. This plan should clearly explain what to do in a step-by-step process to evacuate safely. Here is an example of some steps you might include.

Remember, your instructions should be clear enough to understand and remember during a high-stakes situation. You want important details, but not so much that the instructions become confusing.

6. Create a communication plan

A critical piece of your evacuation plan is communication. If you don’t communicate that there is an emergency, nobody will know to evacuate. You need to be able to get the word out to team members, customers, clients, or anyone who might be impacted on site. Take time to write out an emergency communication plan covering the entire evacuation process, from the moment the emergency starts to operations returning to normal. That end-to-end plan might look like this:

• Inform safety leadership/incident commander of the emergency event
• Send out an alert to the impacted group
• Call 9-1-1 and/or the fire department
• Remind affected groups of the evacuation instructions
• Remind impacted groups of the assembly area
• Send out contingency plan information if the situation changes
• Send out a wellness survey to check if everyone is safe
• Alert first responders/emergency personnel of anyone still at risk
• Communicate with company leaders about event status
• Communicate with family members or emergency contacts of the impacted group if necessary
• Inform the impacted group of the recovery steps
• Give the all-clear to return to the building

One way to streamline your communications plan is to use communication templates. Pre-building your emergency communications means you don’t have to spend precious seconds typing out long messages. You can simply copy and paste the generalized message and add in pertinent details of the specific event. Here are a few examples of notification templates you might use for different emergency evacuations.

You’ll also want to make sure you have up-to-date contact information, especially cell phone numbers for all employees and any emergency contacts such as family members. Out-of-date phone numbers might mean you’re sending alerts people will never receive. You don’t want any of your employees left out of the loop in an evacuation notice.

7. Add your contingency plans

If emergencies were predictable, that would make our jobs as emergency managers and safety leaders much, much easier. But complications often arise, and there is likely to be a shift in the situation that requires a change in response. Maybe a gas leak has started a structure fire, or maybe a flood has created even more dangerous structural damage. This is where your contingency plans come in.

Build a list of potential contingency plans you might need to enact if your emergency evacuation changes. You’ll know your contingency risks if you’ve done a thorough threat assessment. You may need to plan for a halt in evacuation that becomes a shelter-in-place, or you may need to stop the use of a particular evacuation route. Clarify in the plan what alternative actions should take place.

8. Plan for recovery

An evacuation might end once everyone is out of the building and safe, but your business still needs a plan for where to go from there. You can add recovery planning to your evacuation preparedness. Documenting your recovery steps in advance will give you a place to start getting your business back on its feet. In some cases, recovery may be as simple as sending everyone back to their desks to start working again. But in other cases, there may be necessary facilities work, and there will likely be some crisis communication/PR work if there were public safety risks related to the emergency at your business.

Integrating business resilience into your everyday operations is one way to smooth out your emergency recovery. Business resilience is your organization’s ability to absorb and adapt to changes and work through and around emergencies or interruptions, all while maintaining business operations. It’s not about avoiding all risk; it’s a framework that enables your business to recover quickly and even move forward after a critical event.

9. Train your team

Once you’ve documented your plan, you need to train your employees in how to carry it out. This is where it becomes muscle memory. You can start with online training and tabletop exercises to teach your teams the steps and practice their response in theory. But it’s also good to run full-scale emergency evacuation drills so your employees and your emergency response team understand the evacuation plan in practice.

PRO TIP: This is also a great chance to test out your alarm system.

In addition to reviewing the routes and procedures, train anyone who might be sending out evacuation notices to use your emergency notification system. Practice drafting messages and using the system to select which notification channels to use. Practice emergency notifications during your evacuation drill to get a clear picture of how your entire evacuation response works together.

When you send out test messages, your employees get used to seeing emergency messages, so there will be no mistaking a notification for a false alarm or spam message when it really counts. You need everyone to be comfortable with the process from start to finish, so there is no confusion when the scenario becomes real.

Practice Makes Prepared

Quick and confident action comes down to knowing the right steps and practicing before you ever need to perform them in a crisis. With an emergency evacuation plan template, you’ll have one critical element of emergency preparedness accounted for, so you can be confident that your employees are as safe as possible while at work. If you want to level up your evacuation plan and your emergency preparedness as a whole, consider investing in an alert notification system. AlertMedia’s intuitive interface and reliable mass notifications are the best way to keep your employees safe and informed in the event of an emergency.