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September 14, 2005
Katrina's Lesson for HR
It's clear that hurricane Katrina's impact will be long-lasting. It's likely that what worked well, as well as what could have been done differently, will be well studied. But there are lessons we can begin to learn from today, lessons that speak to the heart of HR. Each begins with a question: the lesson lie in how we and the organizations we work within answer.
The largest question is difficult to answer: is your organization prepared for disaster? It's not that hard to assess whether your organization's assets are sufficiently insured, or even whether the organization offers employees sufficient insurance coverage options. But it's more difficult to assess whether the hospitals you contract with are prepared to face credible threats, like hurricanes along the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard, earthquakes from California to Alaska and volcanic action near major population centers in Oregon, Washington, whether your payroll systems and the banks they connect to will remain up and running if a large disaster strikes, whether small community banks your organization deposits to on behalf of your employees will be able to disburse it, and on, and on, and on. If you're ready, how ready are you really?
But a harder question may well be this: what responsibility does an organization have in a time of crisis or need? There's no right answer, of course, because so many variables come in to play and because people seem innately to want to do what they can in difficult times, whatever that may be. But I think there is a wrong answer. It's "we've never thought about it."
When Katrina struck, it brought corporate America a new mandate: to anticipate, and to prepare. Much of this mandate will fall in the purview of HR. Are you prepared?
Posted by at September 14, 2005 11:33 PM