While many business continuity plans are focused on the major calamity and thus on how to recover the company’s infrastructure, maintaining employee productivity when employees can’t get to the office is in many cases an afterthought. In fact, according to a 2005 research report completed by the Telework Advisory Group of WorldatWork, slightly less than 50% of companies include telework in their existing business continuity plans. It is a widely accepted fact that an organization’s ability to maintain normal operations during a major disruption has a direct correlation between an organization’s business success and failure.

According to the book Telework: a Critical Component of Your Total Rewards Strategy (WorldatWork 2007), some of the studies that support this fact are:

• The average loss of per hour of downtime for a Fortune 1000 company is $78,000 and these companies on average suffer one week of downtime per year.
• 43% of companies hit by severe crises never re-open their doors and another 29% fail within two years.
• The potential business impact resulting from a business disruption includes a 62% loss in employee productivity, a 40% reduction in profits and a negative 38% impact to customer relationships.

The quicker a company can get its employees back to productivity, the quicker it can maintain operations and the less it exposes itself to the negative impacts of the disruption. One way to prepare employees to deal with disruptions is to have a well-articulated telework policy. When employees are used to working from anywhere, and have the tools to do so productively, they can easily transform that business disruption into business as usual. Some of the most valuable tools are on-demand collaboration tools, like WebEx.

My Question to you is: Does your company have a business continuity strategy and is telework a component of this?

--Jan Sysmans, Director, Marketing, WebEx