Late on the evening of May 4, 1988, the First Interstate Bancorp building in California caught fire. Luckily, the fire was put out quickly and only two of the employees working at the time were hurt, and their injuries were minor. Looking back, things could have been much worse. Our offices were damaged though, and not safe for us to be in.
So, what do you do when you have a thousand or so employees and no place for them to work?
We managed to find a temporary workspace in the downtown Los Angeles corridor, but had we been better prepared, we wouldn’t have had such a last-minute scramble. Questions quickly arose among our staff about pay, transportation, hours to be worked, when we would be able to return to our building, and so on. And we realized, ashamedly, we did not have the answers.
Our human resources directors quickly became aware we had no relative HR policies to fall back on. There was nothing in the disaster preparedness plan to guide us. We were like the proverbial dog chasing its tail.
…
https://www.riskandresiliencehub.com/how-to-develop-a-contingent-hr-policy-for-disasters/
