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Preparing for the Next Stage of the COVID-19 Pandemic at RIMS Content Roundtable

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In last week’s “RIMS Content Roundtable: COVID-19 Vaccines and Distribution,” a group of RIMS members gathered for an exclusive Q&A with Dr. Adrian Hyzler, chief medical officer at Healix International, who focused on progress with COVID-19 vaccination efforts and moving toward a “next phase” of the pandemic.

“Where we’re headed is: this pandemic will end—all pandemics end—but it doesn’t end all of a sudden, it goes out with a whimper…it sort of just seeps away at different rates around the world,” Hyzler said, noting the rates of vaccination and controls implemented country by country will curb the coronavirus at different paces. “But it’s now going to be an endemic disease, meaning it’s something we live with. We’re not going to get rid of this disease.”

He believes recognition among public health experts that COVID-19 will become endemic rather than be eradicated prompts new conversations about expectations and preparations around the world.

“The new dialogue is: what is the acceptable level of COVID and what is the acceptable level of deaths from COVID? Because COVID is a respiratory disease and people die of respiratory diseases every year, especially in winter. That’s something we live with,” Hyzler said. “We’re going to have to get to a point where there are going to be people who die from COVID every year, but they’re not going to overrun hospitals, and they’re not going to affect care of other diseases.”

Getting to the stage of “a disease we live with” requires mass vaccination, and he stressed the importance of the widespread effort to encourage people to get COVID vaccines as soon as possible. Scientists are not yet sure what percentage of the population will need to be fully vaccinated to control the pandemic sufficiently and, he said, “that’s vaccinated across the whole population evenly, and that’s not the case—we know there are communities where they are vaccine-hesitant, we know there are religious groups that are not as confident about the vaccine, and they tend to cluster, so those are always ready for outbreaks.”

Rather than discuss the sometimes controversial or scientifically debatable concept of “herd immunity,” Hyzler encouraged thinking about “community immunity.”

“‘Community immunity’ is good because it’s more about what we can do for each other,” he explained. “Getting vaccinated, for a 28-year-old, is not necessarily about that person, it’s about what it can do for the community—the older people, the people who have preexisting conditions that make them vulnerable.”

This kind of community orientation and widespread adherence to best practices will be critical in getting to any next phase of the pandemic, and to staying there. Reflecting on his experience of the acute lockdowns implemented in the U.K., for example, Hyzler stressed the lessons learned about the impact of mass adherence to mitigation and prevention measures. “Even with the variant that’s come out here that is very transmissible and has become common in the States, we’ve shown that non-pharmaceutical interventions—which are masks, distancing, isolation, hygiene—they work,” he said.

Many of these non-pharmaceutical interventions will not be going away any time soon—indeed, they may be just as critical moving forward. Hyzler predicted, “I think, into next year, we may still be wearing masks in many situations and there may be a great move to more things outdoors, since we know how much safer that is, and I think we’ll have learned a lot of things from this… Hopefully we’ll also be more ready for something that will happen again.”

As the world moves toward mass vaccination to help curb COVID-19, companies should be preparing for the next stage of the pandemic and creating detailed plans for safely returning to work. To that end, Hyzler noted some large private companies have publicly offered resources to help other enterprises protect employees and operations amid the pandemic and prepare for a return to workplaces.

For example, Ford has published two versions of a “Return to Work Playbook,” one for manufacturing and another for non-manufacturing companies. According to Ford, in addition to providing these documents to employees, “the company is also providing a copy to its suppliers, business partners and relevant third parties to ensure they are all aware of its health and safety practices when they are on site at Ford facilities or are interacting with Ford personnel.” Companies outside of Ford’s supply chain can also benefit, however.

“Add in some CDC advice, and look at what people [around you] are doing, because there are little things you can do that are very specific to your area or your workforce,” Hyzler recommended. “Then, take the information [from the playbook] that’s useful and mold it into a mini version of a playbook, if you’re a smaller company.”

In addition to the Ford playbooks Hyzler mentioned, check out these publicly available resources from the private and public sectors that may offer help in managing COVID-19 risks and creating a return-to-work plan for your enterprise:

Ford’s Return to Work Manufacturing Playbook [PDF]
Ford’s Return to Work Non-Manufacturing Playbook [PDF]
IBM’s Return to Workplace Playbook [PDF]
Kaiser Permanente’s COVID-19 Return to Work Playbook
CDC’s Guidance for Businesses and Employers Responding to Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
CDC’s “Daily Activities” Guide for Returning to Work
OSHA’s Protecting Workers: Guidance on Mitigating and Preventing the Spread of COVID-19 in the Workplace

Participants in the roundtable event were able to debrief with fellow risk professionals in breakout rooms, sharing impressions from the session and experience addressing related risks within their own organizations. For more opportunities to discuss return-to-work plans, vaccine considerations and other COVID-related risks with other risk professionals, all RIMS members can continue the conversation on Opis, the society’s community engagement and networking platform. Among almost 200 education sessions, the upcoming RIMS Live 2021 virtual conference will also offer dozens of COVID-related education and networking events from April 19 to 30, and registration is now open. To hear more insights directly from Dr. Hyzler, you can check out his appearances on the RIMScast podcast.

Preparing for a Pandemic: Review Business Continuity Plans Amid Coronavirus Outbreak

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Organizations worldwide have been reacting to the recent coronavirus outbreak, COVID-19, in a variety of ways, from restricting nonessential employee travel to canceling large events. The possibility of a pandemic has the potential to disrupt workforces, supply chains and economic activity in the months ahead. So, it is with a sense of urgency that prudent organizations review and update their business continuity plans to insure their operational resiliency.

A healthy and available workforce is any organization’s most valuable asset. A pandemic will incapacitate some employees and result in other employees being quarantined. This could result in a major disruption to normal operations, with potentially large numbers of employees working from home or remote locations.

To protect your workforce and help ensure its continued productivity, it is critical to:

  • Establish a strategy that enables employees to continue to function without endangering them.
  • Have a plan to isolate employees should the threat of possible infection arise.
  • Ensure employees can effectively work from home.
  • Verify that you have the tools, technology, capacity, and security measures in place to support a large remote workforce.
  • Review your HR policies to ensure employees will not be personally impacted if they must be quarantined for an extended period and modify any policies as appropriate to give greater flexibility to normal working arrangements. 
  • Determine your priorities and the minimum staffing requirements to support these priorities, in case you need to function with a significantly reduced workforce.
  • Identify key employees and ensure other staff members have received appropriate training to comprehensively cover their absence.
  • Create a communications plan that includes providing employees and other stakeholders with regular situation updates as well as actions taken.

In a global economy, virtually every organization is connected to or dependent upon others. You may not be directly affected by a pandemic, but could be impacted if a vendor at a critical point in your supply chain is. Understanding your dependence on entities outside your organization is critical. Are your critical third parties (e.g., suppliers, vendors and service providers) prepared?

To protect your operations and ensure continuity of services or products to your customers, it is important that you:

  • Map your dependencies to understand where disruptions might impact your value chains.
  • Review the preparedness of your critical third parties (suppliers, vendors, service providers, etc.).
  • Identify single points of failure in your ecosystem.

When assessing the impact of a disruption to your ecosystem, it is important to recognize the amount of time before the actual impact occurs. So, as you review and update your plans, you should also conduct walkthroughs and exercises. This is the best method for identifying gaps in your procedures and will give you the highest chance of successful execution. Active participants will become familiar with the goals and objectives of the plan and begin to use it as guidance rather than a prescriptive list of tasks to be followed without applying rational thought. Practicing the execution of your plan ensures all necessary parties understand their roles and responsibilities.

During preparedness reviews, you should also assess the tools used to maintain relevant information and assist in executing your plans. Old technologies and obsolete tools will put successful execution of even the best plans at risk. Identify any deficiencies in the tools available and create a comprehensive list of requirements that will enhance your ability to execute. The sooner you begin to upgrade your tool set, the sooner you will be able to reduce execution risk.

An organization’s ability to effectively respond to a disruption of its workforce or a critical third-party not only depends on how effective you were in the planning process, but also how effective you were with the tools you have and the training you implemented. The tools you use to communicate, maintain situational awareness, and provide current and accurate information will also have a major impact on the execution of the plan.

High Performance Risk Management

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LOS ANGELES—Risk managers, whose job once focused on a basic “bucket of risks,” and making decisions about which risks are transferable and which ones the company should retain, have been “migrating along an evolutionary path which is allowing us to be more strategic,” said Chris Mandel, senior vice president of strategic solutions at Sedgwick, at the RIMS ERM Conference 2017.

During the session “The Trouble with ERM,” he noted that risk managers now need to alter their focus. “The question for risk managers now is, how do we get our organizations to focus on long-term success and recognize the link between strategy and risk?” he said.

Erin Sedor, president at Black Fox Strategy, said that personal experience taught her the importance of connecting with the CEO and aligning with the company’s strategy when setting up a program. “You need to know what they are talking about and understand strategy,” she said.

Unable to find a satisfactory definition of strategy for ERM, Sedor came up with her own: A set of decisions made at a given point in time, based on business intelligence, that when successfully executed, support the purpose, growth & survival of the organization.

She added that, unfortunately, enterprise risk is not a term that resonates with the C-suite, but strategy is.

She identified three major problems with ERM that can dampen its prospects:

  1. A limited view of the organization’s mission, growth and survival.
  2. Silos. Breaking through them is a nonstop process, no matter how a company tries to improve the situation—especially in the areas of risk management, continuity planning and strategy, which typically happen in very different parts of the company. “It is important to link risk management and continuity planning in the strategic planning process, because that will get some attention and get the program where it needs to be,” she said.
  3. Size. Because ERM programs are notoriously huge, she said, “the thought is that ERM will cost too much money, take too many resources and take too long to implement. And that by the time it’s finished, everything will have changed anyway.”

Starting the process by “saying you’re going to focus on mission-critical,” however, can help get the conversation moving. “Because as you focus on that, the lines between risk management, continuity planning and strategic planning begin to blur,” she said.

Sedor described mission-critical as any activity, asset, resource, service or system that materially impacts (positively or negatively) the organization’s ability to successfully achieve its strategic goals and objectives.

She said to find out what mission-critical means to the organization, what is the company’s appetite and tolerance for mission-critical, and the impacts of mission-critical exposures on the organization. “Risk managers will often ask this question first, but you have to come to grips with the fact that not every risk is a mission-critical risk,” she said. “And not everything in a risk management program is mission-critical.” Using that context helps in gaining perspective, she added.

When viewing risk management, continuity planning and strategic planning from a traditional perspective, strategic planning is about capturing opportunity and mitigating threats; risk management is the identification, assessment and mitigation of risk; and business continuity planning is about planning for and mitigating catastrophic threats.

Looking at them from a different vantage, however, strategic planning is planning for growth; risk management allows you to eliminate weaknesses that will impede growth, which is why it’s important; and continuity planning will identify and mitigate the threats that impact sustainability. “That is how they work together,” she said, adding, “you are also looking at weaknesses that, when coupled with a threat, will take you out. Those are your high-priority weaknesses. Using a mission-critical context makes it all manageable.”

At this point, if a risk manager can gain enough leverage to talk to executives throughout the organization about what mission-critical means to the company, its impact, and then about tolerances and creating a more integrated program, “all of a sudden, you’ve talked about ERM and they didn’t even know it,” she said. “They thought you were talking about strategy.”

Wildfires a Reminder to Update Disaster Preparedness Plans

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Raging across the country, threatening businesses and residences alike, wildfires are a reality, burning a reported 1.

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9 million acres in the U.S. so far this year. West of Santa Barbara, firefighters have battled an intense fire for almost a week. Wildfires are also burning in Arizona and New Mexico. In Canada, the Fort McMurray blaze burned for weeks and scorched some 2,400 square miles of land—more than 1.4 million acres. In five of the past 10 years, in fact, wildfires have ranked among the top 20 worldwide loss events.

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Companies that haven’t already done so may want to assess the impact such a disaster could have on their business as well as what actions can be taken to mitigate damage.

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While most businesses believe they are prepared for a fire, especially if their building is equipped with fire alarms, fire extinguishers, smoke detectors and an evacuation plan, these measures may not be enough when stress and confusion take over, according to Interstate.

Organizations could face utility interruption, impacting gas and phone syDocument recovery3stems; they may have flooding from sprinklers, which, mixed with soot, can cause other complications; there may be smoke damage, which can by carried throughout a building through air conditioning systems; and there can be chemical residue from fire suppression systems.

There also may be asbestos hazards from older building materials, ceiling and floor tiles and pipe insulation.

Planning ahead for data loss resulting from damaged computers and burned paper documents is also advised.

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Interstate lists four questions companies need to ask in advance of such a disaster:
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