Disaster Recovery Journal Spring 2024

need to be made aware this is an industry they can step into. Unfortunately, many already have experience seeing active shooter drills as the norm. They may have never organized one, but they have par ticipated in many of these drills in school. Why not take advantage of that experi ence for the students who are interested in this field? Taking their advice could make exercising like active shooter or weather events less traumatic. Listening to their experience – doing it for at least 13 years – gives them a lot of insight from even Millennials who grew up at the forefront of school shootings, but not actively exercising what to do if it happens while in school. These future colleagues’ insights could change how we do specific exercises and events to benefit everyone. Still, there must be openness to new and fresh ideas and treating them with validity instead pushing them off due to their age and experience. Similarly, people with disabilities have always been vocal about their needs. However, are we listening to what they are saying about their needs? Inviting them to the table to be active participants in the planning allows them to have their agency if a crisis happens and a build ing needs to be evacuated or moved to a safe location. When was the last time you invited people who may have a different consideration than other employees to the table to check in and see what they need? Not asking and guessing what they need could means employees lose their agency and may lose faith they are treated the same as others in the company. Studies show that by 2050, the amount of people who have a disability is expected to double, which means more people will have varying needs. This is something that will have to be thought and planned for in our plans. It may mean working closer with human resources to ensure the needs of all employees are taken care of within our planning. Working with human resources may allow employees who feel comfortable with disclosing to come to the table to ensure we think will enable them to have and keep their agency even in critical events.

The last population of people I want to speak about in this article are transgender and non-binary people. In our plans and exercises, there are easy things that can be done by just updating the language from gendered “man” or “woman” to words like “people” or “employees.” Updating language allows everyone to feel seen and validated in our documenta tion. It is also easy to update during each review cycle, so it doesn’t all have to be overhauled at one time. Additionally, we have to think about the safety of all of our employees. Over the last couple of years, more places have become unsafe to certain communities, like the transgender community. If an incident calls for a team to be deployed to a state or area of the world that has passed laws to regulate their existence, that could cause additional harm to the individual. Teams may need to be reformulated to ensure an organization isn’t creating additional harm by how a team may be configured. Employees shouldn’t be put in an unsafe position. There are so many different aspects to DEI that impact continuity and resilience,

and these four topics in the article are a few of many things which need to start to be incorporated into our plans and exercises. From working with neurodiver gent people, to having more generations in the workplace, the number of people who have disabilities in the workplace, to the impacts some of the respective laws are having on transgender and non-binary people are all things we have to think about because it does have an impact on our plans and exercises. Our jobs are to ensure the safety of people and that operations can continue. Embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of resilience will allow employees to feel seen, they are a part of the orga nization, and ultimately make responses easier as they will know they are active participants instead of having rules forced upon them. Ensuring employees are a part of the process wherever possible is just the right thing to do. v

Ray Holloman, MBA, MS, CBCP, CCRP, MBCI, is a senior program manager for enterprise disaster recovery for F5 Networks. He is also the founder and CEO of Holloman Solutions.

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