HR Webinar: When Bad Things Happen to Good Companies: Preparing for the Unexpected

When Bad Things Happen to Good Companies:
Preparing for the Unexpected
November 16, 2018
Bob Greene

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Today’s Speaker
Bob Greene currently serves as Channels Manager and Sales Trainer at Ascentis.
Bob’s 39 years in the human capital management industry have been spent
in practitioner, consultant and vendor/partner roles. As practitioner, he managed
payroll for a 5,000 person bank in New Jersey. As consultant, he spent 8 years
advising customers in HRMS, and payroll and benefits system design as well as
acquisition strategies. Bob also built a strategic HCM advisory practice for Xcelicor
(now Deloitte Consulting.)
As vendor/partner, he has had prominent roles in sales support, marketing and
product management at several companies and currently Ascentis. Bob recently
re-joined the Editorial Board of IHRIM's Workforce Solutions Review journal, as
Contributing Editor. His experience also includes two years as Adjunct Lecturer in
HRIS at Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois. In addition to his 39 years of
experience, Bob also holds a BA in English from Rutgers University.
Bob Greene

Agenda
• Part I: The Problems No HR Professional Wants or Expects….
…Yet Must Always Be Prepared For
• A Brief History of Workplace Disasters
• The Emergency Management Cycle
• Part II: Preparedness
• Policy Management
• Part III: Response
• Where Is Everybody?
• Part IV: Recovery
• Benefits Coordination
• Part V: Mitigation
• Training and the LMS
• Succession Planning
• Steps Every Employer Can Take NOW!
• How Ascentis Can Help

Part I – When Disaster Strikes
Background

Workplace Disasters Come in Many Shapes and Sizes:
• At about 4:40 pm on March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist
Factory in lower Manhattan, killing 146 garment workers.
• On December 2, 2015, at an office training event and holiday party in San
Bernardino, California, a pair of individuals opened fire and killed 14,
wounding 22 more.
• On October 17, 1989, at 5:04 pm while many people were still at work or
starting their commutes home, a devastating magnitude 6.9 earthquake near
Loma Prieta Peak, California resulted in 63 deaths and 3,757 injuries.
• And on September 11, 2001, a total of 2,977 Americans perished in the worst
terrorist attack on our soil in American history. Of these victims, at least 91%
were employees at work when the attacks occurred.
Preparing for the Unthinkable…

What Did All These Disasters Have in Common?
• They all occurred at times and/or locations where many or most of the victims
were at work.
• They all resulted in deaths and injuries to individuals while they were at work.
• And as a result, attention and pressure would naturally be directed toward HR
professionals, both in terms of the reaction to the disasters by HR, as well as
the preparedness of the workforce to deal with this disaster (or more
pointedly, the next one), which also falls as a responsibility to Human
Resources.

All too often, HR professionals are placed in a uniquely difficult
position:
• We must stay vigilant for the next potential disaster while not obsessing about it.
• We must prepare our employees to react and respond to the next potential
disaster without freighting it with so much anticipation that those employees
obsess about it.
• And we must empathize with our employees and their families who are personally
impacted, while steeling our wills to deal with the media, benefits providers, law
enforcement, and any number of others demanding of our time in the immediate
aftermath of these events.

There are also important implications for HR Technology:
• The HRIS/Employee Portal has a role to play in employee communications,
planning, benefits administration, and overall policy management.
• The Timekeeping application has an important role to play at crucial points in the
process because only it can answer the question “where is everybody?”
• Learning Management and Content can/should be leveraged to train all
employees to deal with any possible incident arising at work:
• How to respond
• Tips for staying safe
• Corporate community support and what the organization is doing to keep them safe
• Succession Planning to ensure that the corporation has a solid “survival” plan.

Realistically Assessing the Likelihood
Over the last 30 years (1988-2018):
• There have been 32 “mass” workplace shootings in the
US (counting only those where there were 3 or more
deaths per incident.)
• These have totaled 189 fatalities and 121 injuries.
• Using 129 million as the number of individuals employed
in the US this year, that represents 0.00015%.
• Put another way, an employee’s chances of being killed
in such an incident are 1 in 683,000, about the same as
being struck by lightning (1 in 700,000).
• Assuming an even distribution of these incidents over
30 years, an employee is 30 times more likely to be
struck by lightning in any single year than to be a victim
of gun violence in a mass shooting at work!
Preparing for the Unthinkable… Incident Fatalities Injuries
Total
Casualties
San Bernardino mass shooting (San Bernardino, California, 2015) 14 21 35
Atlanta day trading spree killings (Atlanta, Georgia, 1999) 9 13 22
Standard Gravure shooting (Louisville, Kentucky, 1989) 9 12 21
United States Postal Service shooting (Edmond, Oklahoma, 1986) 15 6 21
Excel Industries mass shooting (Hesston, Kansas, 2016) 3 14 17
Lockheed Martin shooting (Meridian, Mississippi, 2003) 7 8 15
Planned Parenthood clinic (Colorado Springs, Colorado, 2015) 3 9 12
Hartford Beer Distributor shooting (Manchester, Connecticut, 2010) 9 2 11
ESL shooting (Sunnyvale, California, 1988) 7 4 11
Royal Oak postal shootings (Royal Oak, Michigan, 1991) 5 5 10
Navistar shooting (Melrose Park, Illinois, 2001) 5 4 9
Hotel shooting (Tampa, Florida, 1999) 5 3 8
Accent Signage Systems shooting (Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2012) 7 1 8
Goleta postal shootings (Goleta, California, 2006) 8 0 8
Caltrans maintenance yard shooting (Orange, California, 1997) 5 2 7
Fort Lauderdale revenge shooting (Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 1996) 6 1 7
R.E. Phelon Company shooting (Aiken, South Carolina, 1997) 4 3 7
Wakefield massacre (Wakefield, Massachusetts, 2000) 7 0 7
Atlantis Plastics shooting (Henderson, Kentucky, 2008) 6 1 7
Xerox killings (Honolulu, Hawaii, 1999) 7 0 7
Capital Gazette shooting (Annapolis, Maryland, 2018) 5 2 7
Edgewood businees park shooting (Edgewood, MD, 2017) 3 3 6
Rite Aid warehouse shooting (Perryman, MD, 2018) 3 3 6
Walter Rossler Company massacre (Corpus Christi, Texas, 1995) 6 0 6
Connecticut Lottery shooting (Newington, Connecticut, 1998) 5 1 6
T&T Trucking shooting (Bakersfield, CA, 2018) 5 0 5
Chuck E. Cheese's killings (Aurora, Colorado, 1993) 4 1 5
Florida awning manufacturer shooting (Orlando, Florida, 2017) 5 0 5
San Francisco UPS shooting (San Francisco, CA, 2017) 3 2 5
Pennsylvania supermarket shooting (Tunkhannock, PA, 2017) 3 0 3
Rural Ohio nursing home shooting (Kirkersville, Ohio, 2017) 3 0 3
Yountville veterans home shooting (Yountville, California, 2018) 3 0 3
189 121 310

The four generally recognized Emergency
Management “phases:”
• Preparedness: planning, training, and educational
activities for events that cannot be mitigated…
• Response: occurs in the immediate aftermath of a
disaster. During the response phase, business and
other operations do not function normally…
• Recovery: restoration efforts occur concurrently with
regular operations and activities…
• Mitigation: actions taken to prevent or reduce the
cause, impact, and consequences of disasters…
The Emergency Management Lifecycle
https://training.fema.gov/emiweb/downloads/is111_unit%204.pdf

Part II – Preparedness
Preparation

“The Devil’s In the Details…”
• …and the details are often in the data!
• Do you have pictures loaded for every employee?
• When first responders first come on seen, they may need to clear employees
to re-enter the building, or identify individuals.
• With pictures in the HRIS profile of each employee, it’s easy to establish
temporary security access for a lead first responder, hand her a laptop, and
show her how to locate each employee in the system.
• Does each employee have a valid emergency contact
established?
• When was the last time it was updated?
• Do you mandate periodic reviews of the data?
• Are all reporting relationships in your system correct and up to
date?

Policy Management: Much to Consider, Much to Decide
• Emergency Policies are sometimes addressed by
organizations, but too often are not:
• Emergency policies should address every potential situation
• Ideally, they should obligate employees to take/re-take periodic training on
emergency preparedness and response
• And of course, they should be reviewed by Legal.
• Have you established Fire “Floor Captains” within your
buildings?
• Is that information stored in the HRIS?
• Is it time to expand these policies to train the captains on response to other
forms of emergencies? (After all, the same “rules of engagement” mostly
govern your response to other workplace disasters as well…)

Onboarding: Example Pre-Employment Policy e-Signature and Collection

Unlimited Document Attachments

Part III – Response
Response
The ONE Question on the Minds of Every HR Professional in an Organization
with Offices in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001:
“Where Were Each of My Employees This Morning?”

• When disaster strikes, the immediate and very first priority of every HR professional
is ensuring their employees are safe.
• That means determining where every employee is!
• Are employees on PTO that day?
• Working in other offices or from home?
• On company travel?
• Or were they in the impacted facility when the emergency arose?
• Technology has come a long way since the confusion which followed the 9/11
attacks.
• GPS now allows us, potentially, to know where ANY employee is, at ANY time, but privacy
considerations prevent us from “tagging” our employees with personal GPS tracking chips as a
generalized policy.
• Still, GPS can be used to verify the location of an employee when they clock in and clock out.
• Which brings us to HR Managers’ concerns about salaried employees and the FLSA.
Locating Employees

Tracking Employees, the FLSA, and Salaried Employees
• We know that the Fair Labor Standards Act prohibits us from
tracking the hours of salaried employees and using those hours
for any pay-related purpose (“docking,” paying overtime, etc.).
• Doing so can cause the employee to be automatically and
involuntarily reclassified as hourly status.
• However, there are known exceptions to this rule.
• For example, we can require salaried employees to record their time,
right down to the hour, for various kinds of time off, with FMLA
intermittent leave being the perfect illustration of this exception.

Tracking Employees, the FLSA, and Salaried Employees
• There is nothing in the FLSA, however, to preclude employers from
requiring a check-in and check-out procedure, of ALL classes of
employees, to address workplace safety and security concerns.
• Many HCM Suites (either through their HRIS modules or through Time &
Attendance) offer “In/Out Board” capabilities for ALL employees.
• The concept is straightforward:
• …for hourly employees, we gather their “in or out” of office status and their
location, from their normal clock-ins/outs – whether collected by timeclock,
telephony, security badge integration, web based punching, or mobile apps.
• …for salaried employees, on the other hand, we simply require that they
“check in” and the information we maintain on them is limited to the fact
that “as of this time and date, they are at work and on the premises at our
__________ facility.”

The “In/Out” Board
A good HCM Suite should include an
In/Out Board
• The board answers the key question with immediate
color-coded feedback: “who is at work and who is not?”
• More sophisticated capabilities can include:
• use of GPS technology to track location of clock-in/clock-out within
a few feet, and/or
• use of RFID technology to detect badges “near” a device without
having to swipe a badge.
• Note that for salaried employees (FLSA-exempt) this
information about clock-ins/clock-outs should not be
passed to payroll.
• Additionally, records retention for salaried/exempt
employee in/out board information should be carefully
considered: once the utility of the “on/off-premises”
information is no longer needed, it should no longer be
retained.

Part IV – Recovery
Employee Impacts and Recovery
• One area of significant impact for employees who become disaster
victims is benefits policies and claims.
• Benefits plans that will potentially present challenges include:
• Long-Term Disability, Workers Compensation
• Life, Supplemental Life
• AD&D
• Business Travel
• Questions to ask of each provider BEFORE an incident occurs:
• Are “acts of terror” excluded from coverage?
• What (specifically, please) constitutes an act of terror?
• Are “acts of God” excluded from coverage?
• What (specifically, please) constitutes an act of God?

Part V – Mitigation
Mitigation

• One Corporation’s Survival Story
• In 2001, Cantor Fitzgerald was a large Wall Street trading firm with 960 employees, well-
respected by their customers, and an innovator in the emerging science of electronic trading.
• They occupied the 101st – 105th floors of Tower One of the World Trade Center.
• On the morning of September 11, 2001, they lost 658 employees to the terrorist attacks – more
than 60% of their people, and more than any other single employer that horrible day.
• Against all odds, this company survived, and today employs more than 12,000 people, in 60
locations, in 20 countries.
• This was due, in no small part, to the tenacity of their CEO, Howard Lutnick, who lost his brother
in the attacks.
• Mr. Lutnick gave the victims’ families 25% of the firm’s profits for five years,
and 10 years of paid health insurance. This undoubtedly helped give him
and his surviving employees the will and the reason to go on
and rebuild their business.
Background: The Story of Cantor Fitzgerald
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/cantor-fitzgerald-9-11-story-howard-lutnick-2011-9

• The Myths Around Succession Management…and the Truth
• The Myth: “I only need it for a few CxO positions. I can do that on a spreadsheet.”
The Reality: Companies need good succession planning for any critical position, a
vacancy in which would delay (or stop dead in its tracks) any major manufacturing or
production process, or any project or initiative critical to company overall success.
• The Myth: “It’s only for BIG companies. We have 250 people. Why would we need it?”
The Reality: A great argument can be made that smaller companies can be even more
negatively impacted by sudden vacancies in key positions than larger ones, since there
is less bandwidth to have others in similar positions cover work temporarily. Family
owned and/or managed organizations can be particularly vulnerable.
• The Myth: “It’s too complex.”
The Reality: Actually, most of the information needed by Succession Planning is
already captured if you have a robust Performance Management cycle. Generally, all
that needs to be added is “hi-po” information, and development of talent pools.
Succession Planning: Myths & Reality

Succession Planning: Required Capabilities

Succession Planning: Required Capabilities
Promotion
Ready
“Up or
Out”

• For Emergency Preparedness and Risk Mitigation, Think of
Your LMS Just Like a Pre-Flight Passenger Safety Briefing
• We’ve all been there. The plane is buttoned up, you can’t wait to leave the gate and start your trip, the
cabin is overheated, you’re struggling to stay awake, and there’s that annoying flight attendant with the
tiny seat belt and yellow plastic cup in her hand, and they expect you to listen to her about what to do in
case of emergency.
• But knowledge is power, and never so much as in an emergency – any kind of an emergency. Knowledge
helps reduce the mind and body’s desire to panic. If the learner was truly paying attention during that
training, they will immediately go to the part of their brain where they stored the key takeaways, and start
running their mental “what-if” checklist.
• This is why experts say:
• “Plane crashes are much safer than they used to be.
• Between 1962 and 1981, among crashes that had at least one fatality, 54% of the people on board died.
• Between 1982 and 2009, that percentage dropped to 39%, a decrease credited to wider bodied planes that are
safer and to [publicity around situations like that of] Sully Sullenberger.
• Perhaps more to the point, 76% of people in crashes survive.”
Background: The Role of an LMS
Source: https://psmag.com/economics/watch-pre-flight-safety-demonstration-85109

• For Emergency Preparedness and Risk Mitigation, Think of
Your LMS Just Like a Pre-Flight Safety Briefing
• So we know we need an LMS.
• And some pre-fab content might be good, too since it will be authored by experts and save
us time.
• But how do we ensure it is effective?
• We need some evidence of this BEFORE the emergency occurs, because we hope it never will, and if it does,
that is NOT the time to find out that your training wasn’t effective.
• The answer is SCORM (or AICC) compliance, and a little ingenuity on our parts.
• SCORM allows us to measure attendance, set maximum read-through times, offer Q&A feedback loops, and
most importantly, embed quizzes, and perhaps even a “final exam,” recording each learner’s results.
• This gives us the knowledge of whether the training was effective or not, and we can fine-tune the content
based on it.
• As for the ingenuity part, it’s not that difficult to come up with a few prizes, giveaways or
other “gimmicks” designed to keep learners listening, and motivated to score high on that
“final.”
Background: The Role of an LMS

Learning Management: Required Capabilities

Steps Every Employer Can Take NOW!
If It’s Good Enough For FEMA…

1. Preparedness
• Start with an inventory of current policies.
• Do you have policies specific to Emergency Management?
• When were they last updated and what kinds of crises do they address?
• How do your policies and procedures involve your leaders, at various levels, to execute an
emergency plan in a crisis? (No HR person can do it alone!)
• Bear in mind that, when it comes to training, once is “ok” but repeated annual or semi-annual
“refreshers” is better. How do your policies address this?
• Next, give your background check process…a background check!:
• What kinds of background checks do you do?
• Do you do these checks on EVERYONE? Or different checks for different groups, by job or perhaps
by management level? (Common fallacy: someone capable of “snapping” and committing
workplace violence is unlikely to be in the management or leadership ranks…)
Four Key Steps to Address Emergency Response Within Your Organization
Steps Every Employer Should Take NOW!

2. Response
• If a crisis occurred at one of your locations tomorrow, could you immediately identify
where every employee was located at the time the event occurred?
• If not, how can you leverage HCM Technology to address that gap?
• Do you have every employee’s emergency contact information on file, and is it
current?
• Do you have every employee’s picture updated in their profiles (actual pictures,
please, no avatars or cartoon clip-art of Shrek or a Elsa – no matter how much the
employee loves them!) Are you ready to hand off this information to first responders
to make it easier for them to do their jobs?

3. Recovery
• The time to know how your benefits plan providers will react to a crisis (that includes
casualties) is NOT after that crisis occurs.
• When was the last time you reviewed all group insurance policy language about
exclusions, and what might constitute an “act of God” or an “act of terror.”
• Do you need additional coverage, or a rider specific to possible workplace violence?
• Always include your Legal team/resources in these reviews. Insurance plans can be
complex, vary by line of coverage, and also may vary by state.

4. Mitigation
• Do you have an LMS?
• If so, do you include as mandatory, training related to crisis management?
• Do you require this training to be re-taken periodically?
• Do you offer different levels of training to individual contributors vs. team leaders,
involving those leaders more proactively in the response?
• Are you completely “self-propelled” on the content for this training? Is keeping up
with the latest nuances of the training becoming too much, and is it time to think
about pre-configured course content?
• Do you have a succession plan in place? If not, you absolutely should.
• How “deep” does your succession plan go within the organization?
• How well does your HCM technology support your succession planning efforts?
(#BecauseExcelIsNotEnough!)

Ascentis can help
Payroll HR &
Benefits
Talent
Management
Recruiting &
Onboarding
Time &
Attendance
›HRIS/Recruiting:
Policy Acknowledgements,
E-Signature, Unlimited Attachments
›Timekeeper:
In/Out Board,
GPS Location Monitoring
›Talent: LMS
Training Records, Full LMS Player,
SCORM Compliant Content
›Talent: Succession Mgmt
Talent Pools, Nine-Box Analysis,
Successor Reporting, Career Paths

Learn more
Request an assessment of your organization’s
HCM Technology Emergency Response capabilities

Contact Us
webinars@ascentis.com
www.ascentis.com
800.229.2713

HR Webinar: When Bad Things Happen to Good Companies: Preparing for the Unexpected

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