In honor of 9/11 and National Preparedness Month, today’s blog post focuses on risk management. Does your property have an effective emergency response plan in place? Below is our checklist to see if your business and tenants are truly protected should a crisis arise. If less than five apply to you, it may be time to make a change.

? Planning: We have an emergency response planning committee and Senior Management approves written emergency response plans annually. Our written plan clearly details chain of command for emergency situations.

? Communication: We have have an automated process in place for emergency broadcasting and are able to track responses from employees, vendors and staff during and after an emergency.

? Education: We emphasize employee preparedness by: identifying response teams of people trained in first aid and CPR/AED, having at least 10% of employees trained annually in first aid and CPR/AED, offering first aid/CPR/AED training to employees annually, and providing emergency preparedness training to all new employees.

? Drills & Exercises: We conduct the following drills and exercises at least once a year: building evacuation drill, tabletop exercise, Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP) activation drill, medical emergency response exercise, shelter-in-place drill, practice procedures for specific disasters in our area.

? Evaluation: We complete after-action reports and evaluations following each drill, exercise and real emergency situation. The after-action report identifies concerns about plan compliance and forwards the resulting recommendations to our emergency planning committee and senior management.

? Data and Storage: We have have a centralized, web-based database that tracks incidents, stores emergency preparedness documentation, procedures and equipment lists, stores up-to-date employee, tenant, and vendor contact information, and is able to broadcast and track emergency information to various stakeholder groups during and after an emergency

So what’s your score? For help implementing an effective emergency preparedness program, request a conversation with one of our consultants today. Building Engines’ customers use our web-based and mobile tools to manage, track and monitor all preparedness information, automate the emergency notification and response process, manage visitor access and more.