Make business continuity a priority
Business continuity management is an art and science all of its own, and best practice is evolving all the time.
We hope you've taken the opportunity to download our ERM Toolkit summary, have considered forming an ERM Working Group (if you don’t already have one), and have looked at our Risk register template which is designed to help you quantify the strategic issues facing your business and others in your sector.
But it’s worth asking why you should take ERM so seriously.
The answer, of course, is that you want to ensure that damage and disruption for you and your clients are kept to an absolute minimum when – not if – some of these anticipated risks actually eventuate.
In short, you want to guarantee Business Continuity.
At Ecclesiastical, we have long taken ERM seriously, and have thorough plans in place to cope with almost any eventuality.
This meant that – when the COVID pandemic hit in early 2020 – we were able to quickly implement the responses necessary to keep the business running smoothly.
We moved staff to working from home, prioritised those parts of our business which absolutely couldn’t drop off – such as dealing with claims for our customers – and arranged our IT and communications around that objective.
It meant that we were able to provide a seamless service.
Of course, we all hope that the pandemic was a once-in-a-lifetime event.
But there are many more mundane and even humdrum strategic threats out there that you can and should be planning to circumvent, whatever the size and complexity of your organisation.
Business continuity management is an art and science all of its own, and - as you will know - best practice is evolving all the time. The Ecclesiastical risk team's comprehensive and user-friendly guidance document will help you navigate the key stages of the business continuity lifecycle.
We won’t go into the full details here, but it explains what a good Business Continuity Policy looks like, how to implement, maintain and review it, and how to tie it into your broader Enterprise Risk Management culture. It also includes some very useful appendices, with a template Business Impact Analysis, suggested risk categories, and a potential Crisis Response checklist for you to adapt.
Used with our other resources, it should help future-proof your business against whatever the world has to throw at it!
Steph Jackson is Senior Enterprise Risk Management Consultant, at Ecclesiastical
