Staying Connected When Natural Disasters Disrupt Remote Teams

00;00;00;01 - 00;00;14;12
Marisa Eikenberry
When disaster strikes, what happens to your work, whether it's hurricanes, floods or blizzards? These events can disrupt our lives and our jobs in an instant. As your workplace prepared.

00;00;14;14 - 00;00;28;23
Marisa Eikenberry
You. Welcome back to the long distance work life. We help you live, work, and thrive in remote and hybrid teams. I'm Mercer, I can marry a fellow remote worker. And joining me is my co-host and remote work expert, Wayne Trimble. Hi, Wayne.

00;00;28;25 - 00;00;46;24
Wayne Turmel
Hello there. Marissa. Hello, listeners. Greetings from Las Vegas, where we have set a record for days over 100 degrees, and people are melting on the sidewalk. And so does rasters. And nature and stuff is very much on people's minds.

00;00;46;27 - 00;01;17;26
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? And so, listeners, as we are recording this, Hurricane Helen just came through, multiple states in the past weekend. And so we thought that this would be a really interesting episode while we dive into a very critical topic, which is how workplace workplaces handle natural disasters and ensure that business continues while keeping employees safe. So, Wayne, I just want to start off by saying, like, you know, all of these different things happen blizzards, wildfires, we've heard different stuff.

00;01;17;28 - 00;01;31;12
Marisa Eikenberry
Oh, definitely. Over the past couple of years. And how can organizations ensure that business continuity while prioritizing employees safety during these natural disasters? Because, like business can always stop? Yeah.

00;01;31;13 - 00;02;01;10
Wayne Turmel
Therein lies the problem. What I am going to say is based merely on multiple news reports. I'm not taking it from a single source, and I don't know the veracity of it, but we know of at least one company in Tennessee. People wanted to evacuate the workplace. The employer said no until it was too late, and there were 10 or 11 fatalities as a result.

00;02;01;12 - 00;02;30;15
Wayne Turmel
This is thankfully not common, but it ain't unheard of either, right? So this is a very real thing, and you can be cynical and say this ties to the whole work in the office presenteeism kind of thing. But it's also companies are trying to make a living, and they're trying to get as much work done as they can before the storm or the fire or whatever it is happens.

00;02;30;15 - 00;02;34;06
Wayne Turmel
And, you know, we we guess wrong, right?

00;02;34;12 - 00;02;36;17
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. Weather can be unpredictable in that way.

00;02;36;20 - 00;03;03;25
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. So I am not casting blame other than to say that it happens. Right. But that does raise the issue of with sufficient warning. What are the company's plans. How much of a company's work can in fact be done off site. And this is where to say we are going to abandon remote work and everybody get back to the office.

00;03;03;27 - 00;03;34;28
Wayne Turmel
This is exactly the kind of thing that one faces. Before Covid, companies were starting to put call them business continuity plans. Call them what you want in place. And some of this is helped by the fact that so much is now on the cloud, or that the servers are somewhere other than the office. I mean, 1520 years ago your office had a huge server farm in it, and if your office went down, so did everything you own then?

00;03;34;28 - 00;04;07;01
Wayne Turmel
No. Right. That's that's less and less the case now for most organizations. So you know, what is the plan? First of all, for the data, your business has to survive. Your company has to survive. And then how do you ensure that people can get at it? And if you are in a cloud environment, if you are in a paid server environment where the servers are somewhere other than where you are, and if you're experiencing the disaster, hopefully your servers are not.

00;04;07;03 - 00;04;33;20
Wayne Turmel
But ready. What is the plan? And I think that organizations need to have a plan that says even people who don't normally work outside of the office need to know how to access the data. They need to know how to if they're on a VPN, they need to know how to do that. There needs to be there.

00;04;33;21 - 00;04;42;25
Wayne Turmel
And ironically, you know, if you put it in a manual, in the manuals in the office and the office is no longer there, that's a point.

00;04;42;27 - 00;04;43;06
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;04;43;06 - 00;05;01;19
Wayne Turmel
And I, you know, I say that I'm not making light of the situation clearly. So the first thing is think about it from an organization standpoint. If something happens, I mean, we talk in the office all the time about what if Kevin gets hit by a bus?

00;05;01;22 - 00;05;08;23
Marisa Eikenberry
Yep. We've said that about many, many people on our team just because of how integral they are.

00;05;08;26 - 00;05;22;08
Wayne Turmel
Right. We don't want that to happen. We clearly keep you know, we keep him wrapped in bubble wrap when he's not in the office. But you have to have those conversations, and it's irresponsible not to.

00;05;22;10 - 00;05;22;28
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;05;23;00 - 00;05;45;05
Wayne Turmel
If you live in a place that is prone to hurricanes, if you live in a place that is prone to winter blizzards, if you are, you know, whatever it is that needs to be addressed. How do people, the as many people as possible, continue to keep the business afloat? And if you haven't had that conversation, you'd better have.

00;05;45;05 - 00;06;16;14
Wayne Turmel
And if people don't have access codes and they don't have, I mean, I I've heard of people who, when they return to the office after Covid, lost their access to the VPN. Is that really what you want? Mr.. Mrs.. Business owner. So you need to think about that. You also need to and this is best done I think on a team by team basis is does everybody know where everybody is.

00;06;16;16 - 00;06;44;14
Wayne Turmel
Do they? I'll never forget I had an instructor in one of the buildings at the World Trade Center. Wow. The day that 911 and I spent 14 really bad hours waiting to hear from that person. She was safe. She was fine. She got out at the first sign of danger of building all of that good stuff. But for 14 hours, we didn't know where she was, let.

00;06;44;14 - 00;06;45;19
Marisa Eikenberry
Alone.

00;06;45;21 - 00;06;54;18
Wayne Turmel
What she was doing with the business. Whether what was going on with the client. None of that. We didn't physically know if she was still with us. Right.

00;06;54;21 - 00;06;56;21
Marisa Eikenberry
That's terrifying.

00;06;56;22 - 00;07;23;25
Wayne Turmel
So do people know when there is a disaster? Is there a plan for letting your peers and your boss know you're okay? Letting your peers and your boss know I have internet access and I am available, right? Because some people, if you have internet access, there are things that I could do in your absence, but only if I know that you don't have the internet access.

00;07;23;27 - 00;07;41;10
Marisa Eikenberry
Well, I was going to say with that example, we have a person on our team, Guy Harris, who, he's in South Carolina. So while his home is safe and his family is safe, he was hit by a lot of the storm and, like, didn't have power and didn't have internet and thankfully had a generator. But it can only do so much.

00;07;41;10 - 00;08;00;27
Marisa Eikenberry
And he called me very early on to be like, hey, like, I need you to take care of all the disk or disk, support tickets, because I can't help you unless you know, we need to have a phone call about something. But, like, he physically could not get into the back end to help me with anything. And so he made sure to let me know.

00;08;00;29 - 00;08;16;02
Wayne Turmel
So, is there a plan? Right. Do you have the home phone? Numbers are no longer a thing. But do you have the cell, the personal cell number of all your employees? And do they have each other right?

00;08;16;02 - 00;08;19;05
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. Or directory somewhere that they can access.

00;08;19;07 - 00;08;33;06
Wayne Turmel
Is there a directory that exists? I know teams that put each other in their contact list, because having an online resource doesn't help if you can't get online, right.

00;08;33;08 - 00;08;34;08
Marisa Eikenberry
That's fair.

00;08;34;11 - 00;08;46;06
Wayne Turmel
That's a decision, right? You can decide do people want to be that connected to each other? You assume that everybody's going to be a grown up and behave responsibly right now.

00;08;46;06 - 00;08;48;20
Marisa Eikenberry
Drug text Susan at two in the morning.

00;08;48;22 - 00;09;26;20
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, but that's a that's a very concrete thing, right, that you can do to help make sure that that happens. So you need to think about what's going to happen before it happens. Now, I am firmly of the belief that every time one of these disaster have disasters and somebody gets convinced that maybe remote work is not the worst thing that could happen, because even if everybody is physically safe, even if everybody's homes are physically safe, if the office is damaged, if the roads are impassable.

00;09;26;22 - 00;09;33;05
Wayne Turmel
If any of that is going on, could we rarely meet somewhere else and still function well?

00;09;33;05 - 00;09;34;10
Marisa Eikenberry
And on that same.

00;09;34;10 - 00;09;35;03
Wayne Turmel
That line.

00;09;35;04 - 00;09;56;19
Marisa Eikenberry
Is. Yeah. Well, I was going to say on that same line, you know, for people who have teams that are working from home and stuff like that, I mean, there's still thunderstorms, snow, you know, lots of rain might cause flooding or whatever. Like, you know, we've all been in situations of, hey, we got a really bad storm here.

00;09;56;20 - 00;10;18;28
Marisa Eikenberry
I don't have internet or I don't have power. Right now, but it doesn't make sense to go into the office or in your case, your states away from the office. It doesn't make sense to do that. Like what level of flexibility should companies be offering employees for dealing with things like power outages and internet disruptions or personal crises, even during a disaster or just severe weather?

00;10;18;29 - 00;10;46;13
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, I think that this there's several levels to this, right? On the most basic level, you need to sit and think about what risk analysis is, what are the odds of something happen. And what are the results of it. Did that's risk analysis in a nutshell, right? So have you done a risk analysis on your business. Right. What business absolutely has to be done out of the office.

00;10;46;15 - 00;11;08;26
Wayne Turmel
What can be duplicated conducted elsewhere, whatever. And then what are the plans for that on an H.R level, it's yes, the company is fine, but Maurice's house just got washed away, right? First of all, odds are she's not coming into work a few days.

00;11;08;29 - 00;11;11;06
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, I got other priorities right.

00;11;11;09 - 00;11;37;02
Wayne Turmel
And do we have an ability to absorb that or are we going to stick to the. Well, that's personal time. And you've got five days to get your insurance together because after that we ain't paying you. And these conversations happen and they happen all the time. We are very blessed. I mean, we have had some interesting things in this organization in the last year.

00;11;37;05 - 00;11;59;27
Wayne Turmel
I'm about to go out for my second knee replacement in a year, and we've kind of worked around that in terms of time off and all of that. And it's all very civilized. Guy is stuck in a hurricane zone at the moment, you know, as an organization, we have decided we want to take care of each other.

00;12;00;02 - 00;12;17;29
Wayne Turmel
Right. And there is a mechanism in place for that. Right? First of all, there's a lot of grace. There's a lot of people pitching in and helping each other. That's really the kind of thing that it can happen on the spur of the moment. But boy, it's easier if you've planned it.

00;12;18;01 - 00;12;36;10
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. Well, I was going to say like, you know, I, I know that there's also been situations too, where it's like, this thing is not important right now. You know, speaking of spur of the moment, like, you know, my stepdad died last year and I was out for a week because it was just I just can't right now.

00;12;36;10 - 00;12;56;11
Marisa Eikenberry
And so it was like, podcast didn't get edited like this show didn't happen for a week or two. Like, and I don't want to say like everybody was okay with that. But it was grace was given. Right. You figure out what's the what's the biggest priority here. And frankly, it's not that well.

00;12;56;14 - 00;13;19;28
Wayne Turmel
And there are organizations that will tell you that that is the priority. And get your butt back here. We've seen we've seen it time and time again. Again. This is where the possibility of remote work, the idea of even if it's not all the time, can you access the data that you need? Can you reach your customers? Can you reach your teammates?

00;13;20;01 - 00;13;24;01
Wayne Turmel
Do we know if we can't reach the boss who does what?

00;13;24;03 - 00;13;24;14
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;13;24;20 - 00;13;53;22
Wayne Turmel
Those conversations are uncomfortable and they're weird, but you have to have them. And teams that have had those conversations and they know if something happens to Guy, Marissa handles that. If something happens to somebody else, you know, I know the intricate workings of a couple of people here in job, right? If I have to step in, at least short term, I can do that.

00;13;53;24 - 00;13;56;22
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. Basically, make sure you have a backup person.

00;13;56;24 - 00;14;27;28
Wayne Turmel
We've talked about it and we've planned for it a lot of companies. And this is where bad managers get in trouble, because if you weren't used to delegating, if you are used to doing everything yourself, if you don't share the passwords and the information and the workflows and the relationships with other people in the company. If you haven't included your team on that and built into that because you are so important, God forbid something happened to you.

00;14;28;00 - 00;14;28;21
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;14;28;23 - 00;14;46;13
Wayne Turmel
And you know, this gets back to ripen. Wrapping Kevin in bubble wrap. Clearly it's a founder led company. That's a very serious thing. Right. But we can hold the fort for a bit.

00;14;46;16 - 00;14;58;19
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. I was going to say and and to your point, like there are plans in place if something should happen, like he's got stuff written down in places and knows who to contact and like we know what to do.

00;14;58;22 - 00;15;25;25
Wayne Turmel
But this all boils down to a couple of things. First of all, you have to trust your employees. You have to trust. And Covid proved this almost beyond a reasonable doubt. You know, if we send people to work from home, they're going to slack off. They're nothing. It's not true. When there is a crisis and Covid was a crisis, when there is something that happens, people naturally pull together.

00;15;25;25 - 00;15;47;14
Wayne Turmel
I know Americans like to think they're the only ones that do it, but no, people do that right. They help each other, they come together, they do what they do. So your employees want the company to exist. Your employees want each other to be successful. They want to stay employed. If you want to, you know? Yeah.

00;15;47;17 - 00;15;49;07
Marisa Eikenberry
Hiring like a paycheck.

00;15;49;10 - 00;16;14;01
Wayne Turmel
That's, you know, for the short term, people will move heaven and earth and they will make it happen. But you have to help them achieve it. So have the conversations have not just a central location. I mean, it's great to have everything in a filing cabinet, but if there is a raging wildfire between me and the filing cabinet, that's not going to help.

00;16;14;03 - 00;16;17;06
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? Right. I do have one last question for you.

00;16;17;07 - 00;16;34;26
Wayne Turmel
It just hasn't been being and I'm not being facetious other than my normal smart Alec self. This is serious stuff that needs to be done. But they're uncomfortable and they're weird, and there's always something more important that we have to do until there is right.

00;16;34;28 - 00;16;53;05
Marisa Eikenberry
And we've talked a lot about business continuity and things like that. But one of the things that, one of my last questions for you is like, how can organizations provide meaningful support both during or after a disaster, to employees who are being affected by this and, you know, like home damage, family safety, that kind of stuff?

00;16;53;05 - 00;16;58;28
Marisa Eikenberry
I mean, we've already talked about like checking in and, you know, okay, what can I take from you? But like, what about the person itself?

00;16;59;03 - 00;17;04;22
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, a lot of that is just human grace and kindness.

00;17;04;25 - 00;17;06;16
Marisa Eikenberry
A strange concept, right?

00;17;06;19 - 00;17;37;28
Wayne Turmel
Well, it is, and when everybody is affected, it's very difficult to if there's a team member that I don't normally work with or that I'm not really close to, it might feel uncomfortable and weird. Right? For me to to reach out to them or to offer them something. But generally, most teams have somebody speaking very generically, politically and incorrectly.

00;17;38;00 - 00;18;05;10
Wayne Turmel
Eight times out of ten, it's a woman. That's where is the connector, who knows what's going on and will organize getting food to somebody or making sure that somebody has a roof if they need one or whatever that is. And we need to encourage those types of relationships, and we need to encourage those kinds of people on our teams.

00;18;05;12 - 00;18;09;14
Marisa Eikenberry
I would also encourage having a back that is one of those two.

00;18;09;16 - 00;18;11;03
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. And the backup, one.

00;18;11;03 - 00;18;21;00
Marisa Eikenberry
Of those, I mean, legitimately, because we had that happen where our connector had an issue and we all had a moment of, oh crap, who is it now? We figured it out, but still.

00;18;21;03 - 00;18;38;25
Wayne Turmel
And figured it out pretty quickly because we wanted to we cared. We care about our teammates. We care about all the people that we work with, and employers are shocked at how much we care about them. Right? They really are. How?

00;18;38;27 - 00;19;02;00
Marisa Eikenberry
Well, Wayne, thank you so much for this. And listeners, if any of you or family members, relatives, friends are affected by the most recent hurricane, our thoughts and prayers are with you. But before we go, I do want to let you know that the second edition of The Long Distance Leader is now available. This updated guide is perfect for navigating today's remote and hybrid work environments with new principles and proven strategies.

00;19;02;04 - 00;19;27;08
Marisa Eikenberry
Kevin, I can Mary Wayne Trammell show you how to lead effectively no matter where your team is located. Don't miss out on the latest insights and exercises designed to boost productivity and morale. Order your copy now! At Long Day's Work life.com/ldl and strengthen your leadership skills today. Thank you for listening to the Long Distance Worklife. For Shownotes transcripts and other resources, make sure to visit Longest Work life.com.

00;19;27;10 - 00;19;47;17
Marisa Eikenberry
And if you haven't yet, subscribe to the show so you don't miss any future episodes. And if you're on Apple or Spotify, please give us a rating or review. This helps us know what you love about our show and reach more listeners just like you. Feel free to contact us via email or LinkedIn with the links in our show notes, and let us know you listen to this episode, or even suggest a topic for Wayne and I to tackle in a future episode.

00;19;47;22 - 00;19;53;14
Marisa Eikenberry
We would love to hear from you. Thank you for joining us. And as Wayne likes to say, don't let the weeds get you down. Hey.