When we think about going through a drill at work, the first thing that comes to mind is probably a fire drill. We’ve all been through them. Everyone knows in advance what day it’ll be, maybe even what time. It’s a minor annoyance to listen to the loud alarm and flashing lights and then stop what we’re doing to slowly file outside to a designated meeting place, wait for the all-clear, and then file back in.
But fire drills, while they can be annoying, are an important safety precaution. Fires, if they do occur, can be hectic and chaotic, and the consequences of not leaving a burning building on time can be deadly.
Many organizations employ drills for activities other than fires. For example, a financial services company might have drills to respond to a data breach; a public relations unit might have drills to address breaking negative news; and an electric utility might have a drill to react to service interruption due to the failure of a power plant.
Obviously, it’s not a good use of time and resources to drill for every eventuality. But here are three characteristics of potential events that might justify drilling for those events.
1. The event has a high likelihood of a major impact on the organization.
Drills are intrusive and disruptive to the workday. Employees often don’t like them, meaning they can have a negative impact on morale if they are overdone. For these reasons, drills should be reserved for events with a potential existential or significant threat to an organization.
2. There is a relatively high likelihood of the event for the specific organization.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense for an Oklahoma company to drill for hurricanes, but an annual or quarterly tornado drill might be appropriate. Similarly, a company that rarely handles sensitive data has less of a need to conduct data breach drills than a hospital or financial institution handling sensitive patient or customer data.
3. The event requires rapid action with little time to think and plan.
The first two characteristics deal with the significance of the risk. But there are many high-risk events that don’t justify a drill—high-stakes litigation, for example. Litigation can be an existential threat to some organizations, but the process is long with many phases and time built into the process to organize, plan, and strategize.
On the other hand, some risks intensify rapidly, and panicking or spending time coming up with and executing a response plan on the fly could waste critical time. Take the public relations example above. If a breaking negative news story emerges about your company and is all over the 24-hour news networks, there isn’t time to develop a process to handle such events. You should have a plan in place that dictates who must be contacted, who is authorized to talk to the media, what the basics of any initial responses should be, etc.
It’s always a great idea to have processes in place for important business events. Drilling takes those processes to the next level. It trains key staff on how to execute those processes under controlled circumstances, which will help keep everyone on task and calm if and when the real thing happens.