Managing a Distributed Team Through Natural Disasters (And Other Crises)

As distributed teams become more common, the question for those planning for the next crisis is what to do should the grid go down, as we saw over several days in Texas in February 2021, or should digital workflow tools become suddenly unavailable, as we saw when Facebook and its related platforms were offline for several hours in October 2021. Such outages, on a massive scale, are what keep preparedness and response professionals awake at night. Their experience reveals that, whether your concern is a disruption of hours, weeks, or months, there are practical, prudent steps to take now that can enhance day-to-day business performance while fostering robustness and resilience. The authors present several steps within the following three pillars of crisis readiness: technology, structure and processes, and most important, humanity.