Don't let a winter storm disrupt your work—Let telework make your day By The Telework Guys™

Life may be grand, but when it comes to snow and other emergencies, it sure is unpredictable. You may not feel threatened today, but take it from us; Murphy's Law does exist. It's just a question of time. The fun thing is that we never know exactly when or where the next emergency will hit.

So, how can telework help? Simple. When an emergency keeps your employees from their offices, minimize business disruption and maintain services by having in place a business strategy that lets them telework from home. More organizations have already discovered the bottom-line saving capabilities of this concept during all types of emergencies -- snow and ice storms, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, bomb threats, cyber attacks, political unrest, explosions, fires, power outages, transportation strikes and other labour disputes.

Will your city or region be next?
How many businesses now wish that they had had a telework strategy in place during 1999's “Battle of Seattle”, when martial law was imposed, virtually closing the city down?

When the California earthquake cut off over a million workers from their businesses, telework permitted almost 700,000 to continue to work from home or other locations near home, minimizing business disruption, and in many cases, helping businesses survive. Even with much of the power shut off, telephones continued to operate. Telework was so effective that the government and business sectors formed a partnership to promote telework to provide emergency preparedness.

By way of example, eastern North America's great ice storm of 1998 and the snow storms of 2000 created all types of disturbances. The effects included power outages for millions of residents and workers. In some cases, tens of thousands of federal workers were prevented from getting to work; some for up to several days. However, telework allowed thousands to continue working because power did not go out for everyone or they didn’t care if the roads were bad. Most homes were either not cut off, or had intermittent power while their office buildings were unreachable. Doug Redden, then Executive Director of the Canadian federal government's Institute for Government Information Professionals, said: "if it were not for telework, I would not have been able to do anything." His tools: a computer, pen, paper and phone.

Make telework part of your contingency planning
In any emergency, the best course is often to err on the side of caution. Each emergency, or threat of one, should be a wake-up call giving employers and employees the opportunity to re-examine the telework option, or to expand, refine and promote their current telework practices.

While telework does not apply to all types of jobs, people or situations, it does to very many. To prepare for and limit the risk of business disruption consider the military tactic of spreading the risk. Use telework to spread out your corporate assets -- your staff and your data. Underscoring this is James Wright, risk-management expert and Chairman of the Canadian Standards Association's Risk Management Technical Committee. He says: "An effective control measure to reduce business disruption is to duplicate your means of production. Telework can provide this protection by helping organizations continue operations even in the event of any widespread disruption of work-place."